Student project paves way for medical tool

Indian colleges are often referred to as research graveyards, where thousands of student projects are buried annually. Therefore, it is an extraordinary achievement when a student successfully transforms their final year project into a cutting-edge medical tool.

That is what a group of students from Barton Hill Engineering College achieved. Aloysious Benoy and his team, in collaboration with scientists from the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences & Technology (SCTIMST), have developed a software that generates 3D images of organs from scanned data at a significantly lower price than similar products available in the market.

The method developed by the Barton Hill team, which included Sandhra Prathap, Assay M Kallian, and Akhil Ajith, projects the image onto a screen and can be viewed with 3D glasses. It does not require expensive headsets or costly operating systems and can be used by anyone with a computer running Windows 10.

The unusual success of this student project offers a glimpse of what can be achieved through meaningful interaction between different institutions, demonstrating how young minds in India can become game changers if provided with the right support and facilities.

“It was a perfect marriage between engineering and medicine,” says Dr Arun Anirudhan, a senior scientist at the Sree Chitra Institute who was closely involved with the project. Professor Chandrasekhar Kesavadas from the Department of Radiology, who spearheaded the project, was also full of praise for the students' efforts.

“Hats off to Aloysius and his team for developing the software which met all our expectations,” he said during a recent cardiology conference at the centre after the delegates were shown 3D images developed by the tool.

“The software can convert CT and MR images to 3D images and allows for visualisation of the images in any angle and traversing the image to highlight the area of interest through any plane and axis,” says SCTIMST.

The research centre signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Barton Hill Engineering College in 2022. Several problem statements were offered to students, ranging from developing surgical tools to improving hospital furniture.

Despite an education system that prioritises grades, attendance, and campus recruitment, student involvement has produced surprising results, even though they are often hampered by two major difficulties: lack of time and scarcity of facilities.

This “Virtual Reality in Surgical Planning” project also began as a routine one when Aloysius and his classmates were searching for a final-year project. A faculty member at the college, Anish K John, directed them to this specific requirement of the Sree Chitra Institute.

Currently, when surgeons plan their work, they use 2D data obtained through scanning and study it in detail to devise the procedure plan, with inputs from experts in radiology, anaesthesia, and similar domains.

It takes years of practice for experts to plan complicated surgeries involving major organs like the heart or brain. Teaching such critical procedures is also challenging since 2D images cannot fully capture reality.

There are tools in the market, mostly made by multinationals, that can render vivid 3D images of organs. However, they are costly, require constant software updates, and some necessitate the use of headsets. These factors make them unaffordable for most medical colleges and hospitals.

“As the headsets are expensive, using such tools in education was difficult as a headset for every student was not practical. So our team set out to develop software that could read the data from CT scanners and generate a 3D version of it, to get a more detailed view of the internal organs,” says Aloysius. “The idea was to develop an indigenous program that was affordable for everyone.”

Their endeavour was immensely aided by the scientists at the institute, who provided detailed information from the users' perspective and supplied data that would have been difficult for engineering students to obtain.

“They were even able to instruct the scanner operators on what kind of data was needed and obtain the desired images,” recalls Aloysius.

As the student project achieved remarkable results, the college and the institute filed for a patent for the process. Soon after, a Trivandrum-based startup, Embedite Limited, founded by former Barton Hill college students, signed a transfer of technology deal for the process.

Once the college project was completed, the team members followed their own paths after graduation. However, Aloysius chose to continue with the project rather than enter the job market.

This decision meant Aloysius spent hours at the Sree Chitra Institute, interacting with top doctors and cardiologists like Dr. Dinesh Raja to fine-tune the tool – a privilege he could never have imagined when growing up in Kattappana, Idukki district.

Aloysius says he developed a scientific bent during his school days after he made a small circuit as a science project in the seventh standard. Though he was interested in electronics, there weren't many avenues available in Idukki, and his family, struggling to make ends meet, couldn't afford any extra resources.

“Even I had very little awareness of the difficulties ahead for families like ours. I attended courses to prepare for engineering colleges and successfully cracked the entrance test for entry into the National Institute of Technology, Kozhikode. But even the initial payment of around 50,000 rupees needed to reserve the seat was beyond our capabilities, let alone the 10 lakh rupees the course would entail over the four years.”

Faced with this harsh reality, Aloysius abandoned his hopes of attending NIT and took the entrance exam for Kerala engineering colleges, securing a seat at both the Engineering College of Trivandrum and Barton Hill Engineering College. He chose the latter as he had taken a liking to its campus after a visit.

At college, his interest in developing products led him to join two friends as cofounders of a startup called Tatos Technology. The firm managed to attract enough business, but its main focus was to establish itself as a SaaS firm. So, Aloysius exited after a while as his passion was fixed on electronics.

“That is why I opted to sit out of campus recruitment as well. Only some software firms pick Barton Hill as a catchment area, and I was not keen to join IT firms. Moreover, I was already working with Embedite to develop this software, and they were happy to continue with me,” says Aloysius.

He admits an IT job could have paid more. “But I was earning enough to get by in Bangalore, and I had very little time to go partying anyway as I was busy with my work.”

That choice proved to be a blessing as his time in Bangalore provided an opening to join the Indian Institute of Science as a research associate at their Biomedicals and Engineering Systems lab (Beeslab). It is an opportunity that Aloysius hopes will significantly boost his career as an electronics engineer.

Back at Barton Hill College, the new batch of students is clearly inspired by what Aloysius and his team achieved. They have now set a bigger challenge for themselves: to transform this software, which focuses on educational value, into a tool that doctors can actually use when planning surgeries.

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