Technical Fellow at Medtronic, Surgical Innovations
Dr. Dwight Meglan has applied simulation and robotics to medicine for more than 25 years. He has worked with a number of high technology medical startups and established medical device companies including four surgical robot efforts. His early training was in orthopedic biomechanics at Ohio State and Mayo Clinic.
He left a tenure track position at Mayo and entered industry to be a hands-on engineer with the desire to enhance healthcare by building financially successful technology centric products so that patients would gain access to them. This has led to interesting combinations of technologies in simulation, robotics, image guidance and augmented reality. Some have made it to market, like the endovascular intervention simulator that was part of the FDA decision on training for carotid stent placement, while a number of the more innovative systems have not.
As of 2016, he is primarily focused on surgical robotics. Prior to this he was focused on several surgical simulators spanning open incision to orthopedic surgery including a new open source surgical simulation effort funded by the US Department of Defense. During that era, his group worked on multiple augmented reality-based low cost simulators for minimally invasive surgery and enhancement of manikin-based training such as physics-based AR of bleeding for hemorrhage control training. He has written grants funded for more than $14M over an 8 year span and been a reviewer of dozens of surgical simulation and surgical robotics proposals for multiple government agencies.
He prefers to be a hands-on builder and has on going interests combining computation, motion measurement, and electromechanical systems to enable a more fulfilled life for the physically/cognitively challenged including his own brain injured daughter.