Motorized, Flexible Arm Retractor For Open Abdominal Surgery

Category: Device

Open abdominal surgery presents several challenges: anatomic complexity, depth of the cavity, fragility of the different organs present, and technical issues exacerbated by morbid obesity. Current retractor technology is bulky, obtrusive, inefficient, and hasn’t notably progressed in 30 years. The team is developing a new type of surgical retractor that has the benefits of almost-instant setup time, ease of use and flexible-but-strong retraction. Surgeons would find these controls much easier to use during the stages of surgery. With the successful utilization of early stage seed grant from CMI, the team was able to secure funding from Coulter in 2017 for further development.