SBIR Phase I: Modular And Reconfigurable Electromagnetic Navigation System For Surgical Interventions And Medical Robotics

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is a novel electromagnetic navigation system that offers a transformative solution for a wide range of medical procedures that demand accuracy, efficiency, and safety. The result of this capability and its subsequent commercialization will positively affect the outcomes of medical procedures for patients worldwide.

The system will enable tracking medical instruments over the full procedure space, improve accuracy and reliability, and reduce patient and staff exposure to harmful radiation while being compatible with the intraoperative imaging. It will create and augment navigation volumes on demand during the medical procedures. The system will enable reliable detection and mitigation of electromagnetic interference.

The commercial and market potential of this solution is significant based on customer discovery interviews with industry representatives seeking novel electromagnetic navigation capabilities for minimally invasive and robotic medical procedures. The broader societal impacts of the technology offer flexible and highly customizable platforms across key industry sectors important to United States competitiveness including biomedical, consumer, industrial, and defense sectors.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will advance the development of a new electromagnetic navigation system that requires solving several complex problems involving mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. Millions of minimally invasive procedures are performed annually worldwide which include cardiac ablations, valve replacements, bronchoscopies, orthopedic procedures, cancer treatments, etc.

All of these procedures are being treated with increasing robot utilization. Electromagnetic navigation systems are widely used in these procedures providing knowledge of locations and orientations when medical instruments are out of the “line of sight”. Currently available systems, developed before the wide adoption of robotic surgeries, can handle only fixed navigation volumes and are often unable to track instruments throughout the full procedure space, which may require the use of additional harmful X-ray radiation.

The current systems use bulky field generators incompatible with imaging equipment and provide only limited detection and correction of electromagnetic interference-induced location distortion in the body. This project will address these shortcomings. It leverages the industry expertise and demand validation by leading companies in the minimally invasive and robotics markets, the efficiency and innovation of an experienced team, and a functional electromagnetic navigation system prototype developed by the company.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.