VISE Space
The Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering (VISE) is an interdisciplinary, trans-institutional structure designed to facilitate interactions and exchanges between engineers and physicians. It spans four engineering departments (electrical and computer engineering, computer science, mechanical, and biomedical) and involves VUMC faculty members in more than 10 clinical departments. Its mission is the creation, development, implementation, clinical evaluation and translation of methods, devices, algorithms, and systems designed to facilitate interventional processes and their outcomes. Its goal is to become the premier institute for the training of the next generation of surgeons, engineers, and computer scientists capable of working symbiotically on new solutions to complex interventional problems, ultimately resulting in improved patient care.
VISE’s headquarters are hosted in 7000 sq. ft. of newly renovated space in the medical center. It is in close proximity of the Vanderbilt University Institute for Imaging Science, the large animal surgical facility, and patient operating rooms. This space includes a 550 sq. feet fully operational mock OR, a 1500 sq. feet open development area, a 350 sq. feet conference room, 5 2-person offices, 14 graduate student stations, 3 development laboratories, one wet laboratory, one machine shop, one secured server room, one reception area, and one ideation area with floor-to-ceiling glass panels. The open development area is reconfigurable with wheel-mounted work benches. Power and network connections are ceiling-mounted and the space is lined with ceiling-mounted struts designed to support the weight of industrial robots used in the development of robot-assisted intervention procedures. The space is maintained by a space manager and hosts the VISE program coordinator. It is shared space that accommodates interdisciplinary teams working on active projects aligned with VISE’s core mission. Office space is occupied by staff scientists, research faculty, and, on a part-time basis, by engineering and medical school faculty members who have teams of students working in the space. Development laboratories and space in the development area are assigned on a need basis and this assignment is reviewed episodically by the VISE steering committee.
The following equipment is available in the space.
- Machine shop:
- Fabrication: Stratasys F170 3D printer, Universal Systems LASER cutter (acrylic and MDF). Formlabs Form3 resin printer
- Electronics: two standard soldering stations, a surface mount soldering station, power supply, function generator, oscilloscope, and digital voltmeters
- Small tools (battery powered drills and drivers, dremel tools, heat gun, hot glue guns, vises, shop vac, phantom refrigerator
- Wet lab:
- Chemical hood, chemical prep area, refrigerator, magnetic stirrer, common glass and plastic ware, common chemicals
- Mock OR:
- Surgical bed
- Three surgical booms (2 for surgical lights, one for a monitor)
- Three cameras: one mounted on one surgical light boom and two ceiling mounted cameras. All cameras can be viewed simultaneously on a large screen as well as on smaller remote screens in the OR area. The cameras can be zoomed in or out.
- Recording capability to capture video from a single camera input – video is written to a USB stick that is plugged into a wall connector.
- Open development area
- Reconfigurable work benches (10 stations)
- Four ceiling mounted 55” TV monitors for demonstration as well as educational purposes.
- Conference room
- Equipped for video conferences
- Server room
- Dedicated cooling unit
- Rack mounted Dell PowerEdge R640
- Rack Mounted mass storage server
- Various equipment available to VISE users
- NDI Polaris VEGA tracker, NDI Polaris VICRA tracker, ATI Gamma force sensor, ATI Nano17 force sensor, ATI Mini40 force sensor
- One Acuson NX3 ultrasound machine
- 10 Dell Precision 7920 workstations all equipped with Nvidia RTX 2080 TI GPUs
- Mobile video resources (camera, lenses, tripod and tabletop light box)