Skip to content
Senior Design Day

PortVision: Minimally Invasive Surgical Port to Reduce Muscle Creep

PortVision: Minimally Invasive Surgical Port to Reduce Muscle Creep

Team Members

Erin Minervini

Luke McConnaghy

Supervisors

Greg Gdowski, Amy Lerner, Martin Gira

Customers

N/A

Description

Our project focuses on solving the need to decrease the amount of muscle obstruction during minimally invasive lumbar surgeries in order to increase the surgeon’s visualization of the surgical field. We developed a medical device that decreases the muscle obstruction by expanding an inflatable at the base of a cylindrical port. The product was tested in a PVA mixture that resembles similar material characteristics as muscle which proved the plausibility and efficacy of the concept.

MIS Port Design showing the inflatable ring at the base
Figure 1. Final 3-D rendering of the surgical port highlighting in blue the balloon to push the muscle away
Bench Testing Results showing reduced obstruction in our PVA muscle model
Figure 2. The obstruction of the surgical field due to muscle creep. Proof of concept tests were created using PVA which is a material used to mimic realistic muscle.

What is minimally invasive spine surgery?

Real video of surgery:

Basic Product Requirements

Table 1: Our minimally invasive port must satisfy safety requirements, FDA regulations, customer’s wants, and solve the clinical need.