Thesis award for surgical rongeur
23 January 2012 by Webredactie M&C
Some surgical tools are not suitable to be operated comfortably by all surgeons. For example, a surgeon with small hands or limited gripping force runs into problems if he or she has to use a traditional rongeur to cut through a piece of hard bone during an operation.
Therefore, TU Delft alumnus Roel van Gorkum (Mechanical Engineering) designed a special rongeur for his graduation project that everyone can handle, ‘even’ a 60 year old female surgeon. The prototype of the rongeur has a ratchet mechanism that the surgeon can set to the ‘normal’ or ‘amplified’ operating mode, as required.
On Friday 20 January, Van Gorkum will receive the second prize in the IMDI talent award from science financier ZonMw for his final thesis. Van Gorkum now belongs to the four best graduates of the Netherlands who do research into medical instruments and tools.
- You can download the award winning thesis of Roel van Gorkum, ‘Development of a device to assist force generation for high-load orthopedic actions’, in the TU Delft Repository.
- More information about the IMDI-talentprijs (in Dutch)
- Contact: N. (Nienke) van Bemmel, science information officer, tel: +31 (0)15 27 84259, n.vanbemmel@tudelft.nl
