Left to right: Anshul Porwal, Pranav Saxena, Nima Ziraknejad, Nameet Kumar, Hamid Tohidypour, Jordan Karyanto. Photo courtesy NZTech
Surgery is old — over 2,000 years old. Now, thanks to technology developed by a UBC alumnus’s company, it’s getting a facelift.
NZ Technologies is about to commercialize a technology that allows surgeons to manipulate imaging devices with controls projected onto the patient’s bed sheet during procedures.
“I started NZ Technologies as a consulting firm,” Nima Ziraknejad, a UBC engineering alumnus, recalled. “It was pretty much the way that I made a living,” he explained. The company was founded in 2009 during the first year of his PhD.
Fast-forward seven years later and NZ Technologies has developed a very promising device named TIPSO —Touchless Interaction with PACS in Sterile Operations. TIPSO allows radiology interventionists — doctors who use imaging like X-Ray to perform minimally invasive procedures — to interact with a picture archiving and communication system (PACS), which is common to hospitals around the world, over the operating table without having to touch a thing.
Ziraknejad explained that in interventional radiology procedures, “they don’t cut anything. They pass a catheter through the patient’s body and for that, they need image guided technology.”
The concept behind TIPSO was born three years ago after Ziraknejad was introduced to the problem with the usage of PACS by physicians Behrang Homayoon and David Liu at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH).
Homayoon had been Ziraknejad’s classmate during their undergraduate studies in electrical engineering and was beginning his medical internship at VGH under the supervision of Liu. The classmates had kept in touch and thus, the link was made.
“They had a problem and said, ‘Hey, can you solve it for us?’” recalled Ziraknejad.
Reported by: Barbara Neto-Bradley
