Rebecca Richards-Kortum has spent most of her 30-year profession creating expertise to assist enhance medical care in underserved communities worldwide. Amongst her achievements: She invented a reasonable, battery-operated optical imaging system that may detect premalignant tissues—no biopsy required—to assist forestall oral and cervical most cancers.
Richards-Kortum is a professor of bioengineering at Rice University, in Houston, and codirector of the Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies, which is creating inexpensive medical tools for underresourced hospitals. Her workforce created a set of low-cost medical gadgets, the NEST360 new child device package, to enhance neonatal well being in sub-Saharan Africa.
Rebecca Richards-Kortum
Employer
Rice College in Houston
Title
Director of the Rice360 Institute for World Well being Applied sciences
Member grade
Senior member
Alma maters
College of Nebraska–Lincoln; MIT
For her “contributions to optical options for most cancers detection and management in establishing the sector of worldwide well being engineering,” Richards-Kortum is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology. The award is sponsored by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.
Richards-Kortum, an IEEE senior member, says the award is a superb honor that she by no means imagined receiving.
“I’m humbled and grateful to all of the superb folks with whom I work,” she says. “That is an honor that wouldn’t be doable with out them and extends to all of them.”
Discovering a ardour for medical physics analysis
Richards-Kortum has been enthusiastic about arithmetic and science since she was a teen. When she was a highschool pupil, she thought she would wish to change into a math instructor. However throughout her first yr on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, she took a physics class and fell in love with the sector because of her professor, she says.
She determined she wished to main in physics, however throughout her second semester, she turned involved about job safety as a physicist. She spoke with David Sellmyer, who chaired the college’s physics division, about her considerations. He reassured her by providing her a job as a pupil researcher in his laboratory.
“I’m so grateful to him as a result of he actually opened my eyes to the world of analysis and improvement,” she says. “I labored for him for 2 years, and it utterly modified my life. Earlier than, I had no concept that faculty professors did one thing known as analysis. As soon as I found it, I discovered that I cherished it.”
After graduating in 1985 with bachelor’s levels in physics and arithmetic, she headed to MIT as a graduate pupil with the aim of pursuing a profession in medical engineering. She earned a grasp’s diploma in physics in 1987 and was accepted into the institute’s medical physics Ph.D. program.
“Being a part of a workforce that’s offering care to sufferers who’ve been historically not served nicely by our present well being system is a privilege.”
She did her doctoral analysis below the steerage of Michael S. Feld, who based MIT’s Laser Biomedical Research Center to develop fluorescence and spectroscopy instruments for illness prognosis and endoscopy and optical tomography instruments for imaging. Richards-Kortum labored with clinicians to develop such instruments.
“I realized a lot about find out how to work with clinicians and collaborate with them,” she says, including that working within the analysis heart helped her “perceive the limitations clinicians face when caring for sufferers and the way technologists may assist enhance medical care with higher gadgets.”
After incomes her Ph.D. in 1990, she joined the University of Texas at Austin as a professor of biomedical engineering. She spent the subsequent 15 years there, conducting optical imaging analysis geared towards early detection of cervical, oral, and esophageal cancers. Early detection, she notes, can considerably cut back mortality charges.
She left the College of Texas in 2005 to hitch Rice College.
Offering most cancers care to underserved communities
Richards-Kortum turned serious about creating expertise for underserved communities in Africa in 2006 after attending the opening of the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative clinic in Lilongwe, Malawi. The expertise modified her life, she says.
What struck her probably the most whereas visiting the clinics, she says, was that every one had rooms stuffed with damaged tools. The imported machines couldn’t stand up to Malawi’s warmth, mud, and humidity, and so they couldn’t be repaired as a result of the nation lacked elements and educated technicians.
Joe Langton [left], Maria Oden, and Rebecca Richards-Kortum speak to a brand new mom in regards to the steady optimistic airway strain (CPAP) machine getting used at Chatinkha Nursery in Blantyre, Malawi.
Richards-Kortum returned to Texas with a brand new mission: designing medical tools for clinics in underserved communities that might stand up to harsh local weather circumstances and be simply repaired. She additionally wished to get college students concerned within the work.
To assist her trigger, she and colleague Z. Maria Oden, additionally a bioengineering professor, based the Rice360 Institute for World Well being Applied sciences. Undergraduate and graduate college students on the institute develop inexpensive medical applied sciences to assist resolve well being challenges worldwide.
Richards-Kortum shaped an institute workforce of researchers, physicians, and college students to design a device that might detect precancerous cells to assist forestall oral and cervical most cancers.
Precancerous cells, which have grown abnormally in dimension, form, or look, have a excessive likelihood of turning into cancerous. Precancerous epithelial cells within the mouth and the cervix, specifically, are prone to grow to be cancer. The commonest signal epithelial cells are precancerous is that their nuclei are enlarged, in keeping with the American Cancer Society.
When precancerous tissue kinds, new blood vessels develop to produce it with blood. As a result of hemoglobin within the pink blood cells absorbs seen gentle, Richards-Kortum’s workforce developed a fiber-optic probe that may produce photos of the underlying community of recent vessels. The device can also picture epithelial cells and their nuclei.
The high-resolution micro-endoscope (HRME) gives solutions about an individual’s intracellular construction with out the necessity for a biopsy. The gadget, which is in regards to the dimension of a DVD participant, homes a 475-nanometer mirror, an optical sensor, and a 150-millimeter tube lens. Related on one facet is a versatile fiber bundle, simply 1 mm in diameter, with a light-weight supply and a digital CCD digicam inside. The sunshine supply is a blue LED with a peak wavelength of 455 nm. On the opposite facet of the gadget is a cable that may be related to a laptop computer, a pill, or a smartphone.
To picture a affected person’s tissue, a doctor applies topical distinction gel to the world to be examined, then locations the fiber bundle on the tissue. Among the gentle from the fiber bounces again from the tissue, and people emissions are transmitted by means of the mirror and targeted onto the optical sensor and the tube lens. Photos of the epithelial cells are transferred to a laptop computer, pill, or cellphone. The HRME can picture the world at 80 frames per second. The gadget appropriately identifies precancerous tissue 95 % of the time, Richards-Kortum experiences, and AI-based algorithms are being integrated into the device to additional enhance its efficiency.
“By [using the tool] physicians can correlate the modifications in nuclear construction and the modifications within the vascular construction to see if there are a lot of precancerous cells,” Richards-Kortum says. Well being care employees are utilizing the HRME to display screen sufferers for cervical, oral, and esophageal most cancers in clinics world wide, together with in Botswana, Brazil, and El Salvador.
Enhancing neonatal care in sub-Saharan Africa
In 2007 Richards-Kortum, Oden, and their workforce started creating expertise to enhance neonatal well being care and cut back demise charges in sub-Saharan Africa.
Their first invention was a steady optimistic airway strain (CPAP) machine for newborns with respiration issues. It consists of a shoe field that homes a 900-gram reusable water bottle, which is related to a pump that sends air by means of the bottle and into the infant’s airways. Their CPAP machine was commercialized in 2014 and is now being utilized in greater than 35 nations.
However that device helped with just one well being problem newborns would possibly face, she says. To develop medical gadgets to enhance complete look after newborns, she and Oden helped launch Newborn Essential Solutions and Technologies, referred to as NEST360, in 2017. The initiative brings collectively engineers, physicians, well being care consultants, and entrepreneurs from 12 organizations together with the Malawi College of Medicine, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Ifakara Health Institute.
The initiative developed the NEST360 new child device package. It consists of 17 machines together with a radiant hotter and incubator to assist preserve an toddler’s physique temperature; diagnostic instruments for sepsis and infections; and a low-power syringe pump to dispense medication, fluid, or formulation. The group has educated 10,000 medical professionals on find out how to use the kits.
At the moment, 65 hospitals and clinics throughout Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Tanzania are utilizing the device kits, which can quickly be equipped to hospitals in Ethiopia, officers say.
NEST360 estimates that the package is bettering the lives of 500,000 newborns yearly.
“Being a part of a workforce that’s offering care to sufferers who haven’t been historically nicely served by our present well being system is a privilege,” Richards-Kortum says.
A bridge between EE and well being care
Richards-Kortum joined IEEE whereas instructing on the College of Texas.
“I actually respect the best way the group has thought in regards to the intersectionality between electrical engineering and well being care expertise,” she says. “IEEE has been an necessary voice in transferring that discipline ahead for school members and college students, and doing that in a method that prioritizes fairness.”
Skilled networking alternatives are additionally an necessary profit, she says. Richards-Kortum recommends her college students be part of IEEE not just for the networking avenues but additionally for the skilled improvement and persevering with teaching programs, in addition to the flexibility to share and find out about advances in analysis.