At a Touch

An award-winning automated system sheds better light in operating rooms.

Team OR Lights took this year’s top spot — the Woods-Leazar Innovation Award for Excellence in Engineering and its accompanying $5,000 cash prize — with its automated touch-screen-operated lighting system.

The team was inspired by Dr. Munish Gupta, an orthopedic spine surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis. He noted that up to 25% of operating time was spent physically adjusting lighting equipment on overhead booms, and he tasked Rice engineering students — sophomore Hemish Thakkar and seniors Ellice Gao, Bryn Gerwin, Justin Guilak, Rosemary Lach and Renly Liu — with building a solution.

“With current lighting, they have to adjust it manually,” Guilak says, “and often it’s hard to light up an exact spot at the right intensity and without shadows.”

Headlamps were thought to help, but they require surgeons to keep their heads perfectly still as they work, which can cause neck strain. And headlamps can get in the way when multiple surgeons are working together in close proximity.

“Our system has four separate light clusters mounted on an overhead frame,” Guilak says. Each light cluster is mounted onto a 3D-printed circular base that can adjust its position and the angle of the lightbulbs. “This allows us to aim our spotlight anywhere on a 2D plane and adjust the size of the spotlight we’re creating,” Gerwin says.

In addition to the lights, a lightweight camera is mounted on the frame to supply a live video feed of the operating table.

“The surgeon can [tap on a touch screen] and drag a circle on top of the video feed, and that’s the spot the lights focus on,” says Gerwin. The app allows surgeons to adjust the position, size and intensity of the spotlight with minimal effort.

“There already are touch screens being used in the operating room, so covers, etc., for sterilization already exist,” adds Gao.

Operating room lighting requirements are very specific. Brightness, color, power source, sterilization protocols and even the noise levels emitted by lighting devices are all geared to maximize focus and reduce distraction. The team weighed all these factors carefully in its design.

“The most memorable thing was the moment when we first turned on the lights,” says Guilak. “We had this vision of it working all semester and then when the lights actually turned on and lined up where we told them to, it almost didn’t feel real.”