Pioneering Clinical Immersion for Biomedical Engineers Inspires ‘Out-of-the-Box’ Thinking

Cancer specialists at ChristianaCare’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute are closing the gap between the real world and the classroom for tomorrow’s engineers with a five-week clinical immersion experience.

Launched in 2013 in cooperation with the University of Delaware, the program offers students an onsite view of some real-life biomedical challenges as they shadow surgeons and observe clinical practices in the operating room.

“When we started hosting students for their clinical immersion experience, the program was among the first of its kind and remains today a model for similar cooperative learning experiences,” said Nicholas Petrelli, M.D., Bank of America endowed medical director of the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute.

“What better way to allow biomedical engineering students to think outside the box than to place them in a health care environment to benefit patient treatment?” — Nicholas Petrelli, M.D.

“What better way to allow biomedical engineering students to think outside the box than to place them in a health care environment to benefit patient treatment?” he said.

“For many engineers, a program like ours may be the only time in their careers to gain exposure to real patients in actual operating theaters and to see surgeons working in real time, where the products they will someday design are put to the ultimate test,” said Joseph Bennett, M.D., section chief for Surgical Oncology and program director.

(Upon Bennett’s departure from the Graham Cancer Center in July 2024, Brian Nam, M.D., thoracic surgeon and Arvind Sabesan, M.D., surgical oncologist, will codirect the program.)

Sarah Rooney, Ph.D., associate professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Delaware, administers the program, secures student placements and also mentors them from an engineering perspective.

In recent years, Rooney says the program has shifted focus from finding solutions to identifying and vetting unmet needs. Most of the students who take the UD course are seniors, so ideas that surface as unmet clinical needs may take shape in following years as another student team’s senior design project.

“We want the engineers of the future to be able to design effective solutions to real problems,” she said. “Our program offers students the opportunity to learn from, listen to and understand the different perspectives they will encounter from clinicians, patients and others in various medical settings and to draw from those perspectives in creating future tools, devices and technologies that clinicians will actually use.”

Despite a two-year hiatus during the COVID-19 epidemic, Bennett has helped keep the program going for the last 10 years. On average, the Graham Cancer Center hosts two or three engineering students during the five-week, winter session that starts in January.

“I loved having the opportunity to observe a physician’s day-to-day tasks and experiences, to be curious, and ask questions.” — Madeleine Dugan

The students shadow Bennett and other surgeons across a wide range of specialties that include surgical oncology, colorectal surgery, gynecologic oncology, thoracic surgery, orthopedics and neurosurgery. Students are also exposed to both traditional open surgery and robotic and minimally invasive surgery.

“Our goal is to sharpen the students’ ability to think clinically about ways to improve patient care, operating room flow, efficiency and costs,” Bennett said. “In just over a month, the students come up with some very good ideas.”

Past innovations have included a biodegradable suture delivery system; a waterproof sealant to close incisions; a belly cam to view the inner abdomen; an automated “twitch” monitor for patients under anesthesia; a pill-sized camera for taking pictures inside the digestive track; and a laparoscopic lens squeegee that actually progressed to the provisional patent stage.

Biomedical Engineering graduate Madeleine Dugan recalls her 2019 clinical immersion as different from anything else students will experience during their undergraduate career.

“I loved having the opportunity to observe a physician’s day-to-day tasks and experiences, to be curious, and ask questions,” she said. “The encouragement I received from my advisors was very meaningful to me as a student, and I still draw on my experiences from those five weeks.”