A team of students from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University and the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Tech took third place recently in the Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge.

The team, now called Ethos Medical (formerly known as Neuraline), were among five innovative teams whose projects, all focused on improving global health, won DEBUT awards. DEBUT is a biomedical engineering design challenge for undergraduate students, managed by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and VentureWell, a non-profit that cultivates revolutionary ideas and promising inventions.

The NIBIB prizes were awarded based on four criteria: the significance of the problem being addressed; the impact of the proposed solution on potential users and clinical care; the innovation of the design; and the existence of a working prototype. In selecting its prizes, VentureWell considered two additional criteria: market potential and patentability. The $65,000 in prizes will be awarded during a ceremony at the annual Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) in Atlanta this October.

“This was a great experience for us as our project continues to evolve,” said Ethos Medical’s Cassidy Wang, who graduated from the Coulter Department this past spring and whose team took third place, winning $10,000. Their patent-pending handheld tool is designed to improve placement for lumbar punctures (the process of taking fluid from the spine in the lower back with a hollow needle, typically for diagnostic purposes).

When the team competed in the Capstone Design program last spring, and in the DEBUT challenge, it was called Neuraline, and its focus was on epidural anesthesia placement, which allowed physicians to identify optimum entry into specific anatomical spaces using bioelectrical impedance analysis. The idea is still basically the same – optimum needle placement. But Wang says the team has gone back to its initial focus, lumbar punctures, after further research.

“Oddly enough, lumbar puncture was where our project originally started. The market opportunity there is high,” Wang explained. .”We found that hospitals lose about $450 million a year because of failures in lumbar punctures. There is a real need.”

In addition to Wang, Ethos Medical’s current team members include Coulter Department senior Dev Mandavia, and recent grad from the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME) at Tech, Lucas Muller. Alec Bills (now in grad school at Carnegie Mellon University) and Marci Medford (now working at medical tech company BD) were previously part of Neuraline.

While the team is now taking a slightly different path with its device, the core problem remains basically the same. Different tissue types exhibit different electrical impedances that are measured by the device’s electronics module, which enables real-time tissue identification.

“When lumbar procedures fail, 28 to 35 percent of the time, they have to be rescheduled. That’s the hospital’s cost,” Wang said. “Improving the procedure with a better tool is presents a huge financial incentive for hospitals.”

There were 36 eligible entries received from 25 institutions in 15 different states.

Ethos Medical, which also recently competed for the James Dyson Award and completed the Create X summer program at Georgia Tech, will now focus on perfecting prototypes of its device.