A YOUNG Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) student who invented a potentially life-saving medical device has won a top European innovation award.
PhD medical engineering student Xiao Fang Zhang, 29, was one of three winners at the European Student Innovation Awards, Innovact, announced in France yesterday.
She is due to receive a hero’s welcome when she returns to Cork Airport this afternoon.
Xiao was part of the Med-Ware team, including Peter Sullivan, Michelle Bouse and Carmel Linehan, which was among 28 shortlisted for the Innovact finals.
Ms Zhang invented and designed a new device to detect and eliminate air bubbles from medical infusion lines.
They exhibited the device, which looks like a small plastic ball but employs technology found in airplane fuel tanks, at the finals held in Reims over the last three days.
And yesterday, Xiao’s device was named among the top three award winners alongside 3D camera accessories devised by a French group, and a Norwegian group, Windflip.
Xiao, who came to Ireland nine years ago to study English, said she was delighted.
"I remember seeing a picture of Ireland nine years ago while I was thinking about where to study English," she said.
"It was so green and so beautiful so I picked Ireland.
"When I arrived, I though it was great, and the people are very nice, so I though why don’t I study here? So I started in CIT. It was a good choice."
She drew her project inspiration from several sources, including lecturers Colette Murphy and Bernard O’Callaghan, Ger Flynn, the HSE South’s chief biomedical engineer based at Cork University Hospital, and her father, Gou Yu Zhang, a veterinary surgeon based in Liao Ning Province in China.
Intravenous infusion is the most common access method used by paramedics and in hospitals to administer nutrition and medication to patients.
But air bubbles can become trapped in the tubing. If they get into the bloodstream, they can pose serious risks to patients, including paralysis and even death.
Hospitals and medical device manufacturers use a complicated "air-in-line" detector to remove such bubbles. But the manual process is time consuming.
Xiao’s device removes all air bubbles passing through an infusion drip line system before the bubbles reach the bloodstream and without stopping the infusion process. A prototype was built, more medical tests are planned, and there are plans to commercialise the project.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Thursday, March 04, 2010
