A soft, patient-specific left atrial appendage occluder
While I was a graduate student at Cornell University I was fortunate to have the opportunity to spend a year at the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. The Dalio Institute offers the unique advantage of placing engineers, cardiologists, and radiologists side-by-side to develop solutions for cardiovascular diseases. The Left Atrial Appendage Occluder Project, one of the major thrusts of the engineering lab, was first conceived by the director of the Institute, Dr. James Min, and the PIs of the engineering lab, Professors Bobak Mosadegh and Simon Dunham. With our combined expertise in cardiology, biomedical engineering, materials, and manufacturing, we developed a soft, patient-specific occluder that we recently reported in a paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering.