Houston Medical Robotics Inc.

Article preview from Start-Up - September, 2013

More than five million central venous catheter lines are placed in the US each year, but the high-volume, invasive procedure has a troubling 2% to 26% procedural error rate, and can cause serious and expensive complications. Houston Medical Robotics Inc. has developed the Euclid Tier 1 Mini Access image-guided medical robotics vascular access platform to standardize, automate, and increase the safety of this critical procedure.

Houston Medical Robotics Inc.

Article preview from Start-Up - September, 2013

More than five million central venous catheter (CVC) lines are placed in the US each year in approximately 8% of hospitalized patients, according to studies. However, the high-volume, invasive procedure has a troubling 2% to 26% procedural error rate, with complications including hematomas, infection, arterial hemorrhage, air embolism, and pneumothorax, which cost the health care system billions of dollars a year. What's more, the often critically ill patients who receive CVCs tend to be prone to infection due to the nature of their illness. Image-guided access has been able to reduce complication rates over standard "blind" insertion techniques, but the technology can be cumbersome and is not often utilized. A solution is needed to help standardize, automate, and increase the safety of this critical procedure, and that is the goal of start-up Houston Medical Robotics Inc. The four-year-old company has begun a limited US commercial launch of its handheld, single-operator, image-guided medical robotics vascular access platform, the EuclidTier 1 Mini Access System, for use in various therapeutic procedures including its first application, point-of-care CVC placement.

Four of Houston Medical Robotics’ co-founders are also co-inventors on patents related to the Euclid technology that are pending. J. Patrick Herlihy, a pulmonary and critical care physician affiliated with the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, along with K. Wayne Rennicks, a registered nurse at the Texas Medical Center, worked together to develop a product to make the placement of central lines easier and decrease complication rates. They approached William Cohn, a faculty heart surgeon and associate professor of surgery at BCM and director of minimally invasive surgery at the Texas Heart Institute (THI), and Marcia O’Malley, a Rice University professor with a doctorate in mechanical engineering specializing in robotics, to develop the initial product concept. A prototype handheld robotic tool that could automate the processes of placing a needle, guidewire, and catheter into the central venous system was then developed jointly out of BCM and THI.

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