Engineering Safer Surgeries

When a team of Coulter BME biomedical engineering students touched down in Quito, Ecuador on Jan. 25, they carried more than luggage. Team “Leave No Trace” also brought their vision for preventing surgical errors in operating rooms. 

Retained surgical items (RSIs) are serious yet preventable surgical complications in which sponges or gauze are unintentionally left inside a patient after surgery. In low- and middle-income countries, where access to intraoperative imaging is limited, surgical teams often rely solely on manual counting. This contributes to rates of RSIs as high as 1 in 300, increasing the risk of infection, repeat operations, and prolonged recovery. 

Leave No Trace, one of the BME Advanced Capstone teams, is addressing this challenge with RECUVERY — a comprehensive visibility and tracking system designed specifically for resource-constrained operating rooms. The system combines Ultraviolet (UV)-reactive surgical sponges that fluoresce under UV light with SurgiClip magnetic attachments and the SurgiRack display system, providing surgical teams with a clear visual workflow to support counting and quickly identify missing items before closure. 

Team Leave No Trace, which includes Thanmayee Kavuri, Neha Shahrawat, Ryan Altera, Saif Khan, and bioinformatics student Maxi Brogi, began their journey in an introductory biomedical engineering class, learning the basics of engineering and design. Four years later, the team found themselves standing in operating rooms in Quito, Ecuador, working alongside surgeons, nurses, and clinical staff to help address a real patient safety challenge. 

Shadowing surgical teams in Quito gave Leave No Trace firsthand insight into real workflows, real constraints, and real clinical needs. These observations will help them refine RECUVERY to better fit into the operating room environment. 

The team will continue their work through Advanced Capstone, further iterating and refining the device based on clinical feedback gathered in Ecuador. A core focus of Advanced Capstone is ongoing customer discovery — interviewing clinicians repeatedly to ensure solutions evolve with real user needs.   

Shahrawat credits Advanced Capstone for providing the enrichment opportunities to take RECUVERY to the next level. "Capstone was an amazing opportunity to develop essentially a novel medical device for an unmet clinical need in just 16 weeks. Advanced [Capstone] mirrors the real world and helps us create something that truly helps save lives.” 

By designing alongside clinicians and prioritizing accessibility and simplicity, Leave No Trace aims to reduce preventable surgical harm and help ensure retained surgical items truly become “never events.” 

Their team’s innovation and impact have already been recognized beyond the classroom — Leave No Trace placed third in the Hult Prize at Georgia Tech, highlighting both the global relevance and entrepreneurial potential of their solution. 

Reflecting on their journey together, Khan says, "It’s so fun to see how things pan out after working for four years...seeing how much you have learned and grown. It all builds up to this."