Mondragon Unibertsitatea, together with the nuclear medicine unit of The Rioja Health Foundation, patents a system to improve the visualisation of breast cancer lesions.
Mondragon Unibertsitatea, together with the nuclear medicine unit of The Rioja Health Foundation, patents a system to improve the visualisation of breast cancer lesions.
Mondragon Unibertsitatea, together with the nuclear medicine unit of The Rioja Health Foundation, patents a system to improve the visualisation of breast cancer lesions.
The Rioja Health Foundation has already used the two models manufactured at Mondragon Unibertsitatea with more than 150 oncology patients. Doctors report that the proposed solution helps to reduce scattered radiation by 80 per cent, making it easier to visualise lesions.
Applied and multidisciplinary research is a hallmark of Mondragon Unibertsitatea, which advocates practical research to be transferred to companies, and promotes collaboration with other organisations in different knowledge areas.
An example of this is the collaboration between a researcher and a professor at the Polytechnic School and the Nuclear Medicine Unit of the Rioja Health Foundation, which has consisted of designing and manufacturing a solution to improve the visualisation of breast cancer lesions. The solution consists of a curved lead shield in the shape of a half-sphere that covers the breast, instead of the conventional flat lead plate, and is called an "Absorption Shield". This innovation helps to reduce scattered radiation by more than 80% compared to the conventional method. It thus improves the visualisation of lesions in the sentinel lympth nodes (the first affected nodes) of women with breast cancer by helping to improve their localisation.
The sentinel lymph node technique is used in the early stages of the disease and determines the stage of the cancer. It consists of injecting a radiopharmaceutical into the area of the tumour which makes it possible to visualise the lymph nodes to which the tumour migrates, which is where it radiates and, thus, allows the removal of the part of the breast in the surgical intervention, where necessary, to be more precise and also permits a lower dose of radiation to be applied in the contrasting agent.
After using it for more than a year for the diagnosis and treatment of 150 patients from La Rioja, both organisations have patented the 'Absorption Shield'. This is an example of the importance of cooperation between different organisations and disciplines and of how, thanks to the transfer model of Mondragon Unibertsitatea, it has been possible in this case for engineering to provide solutions to medicine and, by extension, to society.
An engineering solution
Two doctor-researchers from the Nuclear Medicine Unit of the Rioja Health Foundation had been searching for a year, unsuccessfully, for a solution using a curved lead plate to better visualise lesions in breast cancer lymph nodes. The teacher-researcher from the Mondragon Unibertsitatea Polytechnic School, Dr. Xabier Chamorro, an expert in material forming and casting, contacted the doctors and saw that, from an engineering point of view, it was a simple and feasible solution.
After making the prototypes and proposing improvements, Xabier made the final models and the doctors were satisfied that it was exactly what they were looking for.Doctors have been using these items in medical tests for more than a year and report that they are tremendously useful. Now that they have patented the solution at the Patent and Trademark Office, they can publicise the novel solution so that some company will be encouraged to market it.
As a result of this project, the Rioja Health Foundation and Mondragon Unibertsitatea continue to work together to find new ways of transferring knowledge, given that the university has a Biomedical Engineering Degree, a Biomedical Technologies Master's Degree and several lines of research conducting innovation and research projects for the medical field