William A Grissom
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Biomedical Engineering
One in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and it kills more American men than any cancer except lung cancer. The standard treatment, radical prostatectomy, removes the whole gland.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
prostate cancer
focal resection
radical prostatectomy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Develop fast intraoperative imaging on a low-field MRI scanner so the surgeon's image-guidance display updates in near real time as prostate tissue is resected.
- Build the first MRI-conditional surgical robot able to deliver two needle-sized, tentacle-like manipulators into the prostate through a standard transurethral endoscope, and integrate it with the low-field scanner.
- Register high-resolution preoperative MRI, in which tumor is visible, with intraoperative low-field MRI so instruments can be guided accurately to identified lesions.
- Validate the integrated MRI-guided robotic system in anthropomorphic phantoms that mimic human pelvic anatomy, with urologic surgeons performing focal resections.
More about the research
It carries the risks of major surgery plus high rates of impotence and incontinence. Removing only the cancerous part of the gland would spare much of that harm, but surgeons can rarely attempt it: through an endoscope, a camera threaded up the urethra, tumor tissue looks exactly like healthy tissue. Surgeons are left guessing at tumor location from memory of scans taken before the operation. This project aims to remove that guesswork by combining magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) during surgery with a new surgical robot.
Why it matters
Men facing prostate cancer today often have no alternative to removing the entire gland, with the incontinence and impotence that follow. An image-guided robotic system that reliably shows where the tumor is during surgery could make targeted focal resection practical, potentially letting patients keep most of the prostate and avoid those complications. The approach also depends on low-cost, portable MRI scanners, which could make such guidance available outside specialized centers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Liss
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Validate whether restricted signal map values from RSI-MRI, a diffusion MRI method sensitive to water trapped in cancer cells, identify clinically significant prostate cancer, comparing PI-RADS scores with and without RSM in a single-arm clinical trial.
Krishna Nayak
University of Southern California, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and technically validate volumetric real-time MRI data acquisition on a 0.55 Tesla scanner to image the moving heart and airway in 3D.
Haichong Zhang
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop multiparametric photoacoustic imaging that simultaneously quantifies a PSMA-targeted contrast agent and blood oxygen saturation, to identify abnormal prostate tissue and gauge cancer aggressiveness.
The school
Case Western Reserve University: 34 labs on PI Pages, $643M a year on research, 213 research doctorates a year.
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