Dartmouth Engineer

Engineering in Medicine

Summer 2009: Engineering in Medicine

Behind every great medical advance, there’s a great engineer.

By Elizabeth Kelsey

Photographs by John Sherman

Anyone who goes to the doctor benefits from the work of engineers. Every medical device represents a collaboration between doctors eager for better ways to treat patients and engineers eager to push technological boundaries. Dartmouth engineers have focused on medical technologies since the 1960s, when Professor John Strohbehn started a biomedical engineering program at Thayer. Collaborating with clinicians at Dartmouth Medical School, Strohbehn directed his inventive skills to a wide range of medical applications, including mathematical models for X-ray tomography, an interactive image processor for clinical use, hyperthermia techniques for destroying cancer cells with heat, and a frameless stereotactic operating microscope for neurosurgeons. His work inspired several graduate students who today are lead researchers at Thayer, including Professor Stuart Trembly Th’82, who developed a microwave thermokeratoplasty technique to correct nearsightedness, and Keith Paulsen Th’86, who heads the engineering side of Dartmouth’s comprehensive medical imaging programs.
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Evolution of the ultraStand™

Inventing medical devices is all in a day’s class work.

By Kathryn LoConte

Photographs by Douglas Fraser

Sometimes doctors need a helping hand. In 2005 alums Kathy Hickey Th’03 and Amish Parashar ’03 Th’03 began work on a “Biomedical Positioning Stabilizing System” to give them one. “Anesthesiologists were working with ultrasound to guide needle placement under visualization for regional nerve blocking, but found they needed an extra person, or at least an extra hand, to be able to use the ultrasound technology effectively,” says Hickey. “We wanted to make a two-person job into a one-person job to allow people to learn and do other jobs instead of standing there and holding an ultrasound probe.”
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Doctor in the Class

Plastic surgeon Joseph Rosen wants to fix health care. Teaching engineering students is part of his plan.

By Lee Michaelides

Photographs by John Sherman

Joseph Rosen, Professor of Surgery at Dartmouth Medical School and Adjunct Professor of Engineering at Thayer, likes to say that to see into the future you have to look at the past. To understand where Joe Rosen is heading today let’s look back to where he was in 2001.
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