Project Description:

With one million prostate biopsies occurring annually in the US, it is clear that prostate cancer represents a significant global health burden. It is thus surprising that modern biopsy guns force clinicians to individually collect biopsy cores. After cutting a core, clinicians remove the gun from the patient, wipe the core on a collection pad, then reinsert the gun into the patient and search for their next target. All this extra effort increases procedural time and patient discomfort. Here, we propose a novel prostate biopsy system that enables seamless core retrieval and storage without necessitating mid-procedural gun removal. Our gun currently matches basic standards set by practicing urologists and existing commercial guns such as core quality and the ability to correlate sample regions with biopsy cores. As our system sees greater refinement, we look to confirm additional key metrics including actual procedural time improvement during clinical use.

Project Photo:

Enabling seamless core collection without unnecessary biopsy gun removals for transperineal and transrectal prostate biopsies.

Student Team Members

• Kedar Krishnan
• Wendy Yang
• Kenzi Griffith
• Devashree Gupta
• Grace Noh
• Mahmoud Radwan
• Benjamin Wen
• Dylan Zhu

Course Faculty

• Dr. Nicholas Durr

Project Mentors, Sponsors, and Partners

• Mendaera
• Polly Ma
• Alex Hassan
• Marshall Strother, MD
• David Aaronson, MD
• Neha Rajan