A group of senior engineering students at Rice University have been looking for ways to use a device called the clot buster to destroy deadly blood clots.
The five students call themselves "Team Evacuator," and have been testing the device to split up blood clots that form in adult patients' bladders, according to Phys.org. The team includes Aaron Hu, Tiffany Huang, Patrick Yun, Adrian Gallegos and Lung-Ying Yu.
As of now, these clots have to be removed by being sucked out through a catheter in the urethra.
The clot-buster, which looks like an egg-beater, uses a hand-cranked spindle to turn a head at the other end of the line, which would be fed through a catheter into the bladder. In the bladder, a vortex sucks clots toward the whipping wires, and the clots are destroyed, CNET reported.
Because the wire-like blades at the end of the device are made from nitinol, a nickel-titanium alloy that can easily deform and rebound, the wires may fall while traveling through a catheter to the bladder, and then open up when it is inside.
"It's the same kind of metal used in braces," said Hu, Phys.org reported. "You can deform it any way you want, but at a given temperature, it goes back to its original shape. Nitinol collapses very well."
During tests of simulated blood clots made with pig blood and gelatin, Team Evacuator used a cut-down rod to power the clot buster.
While the current prototype requires both hands to for dexterity, the team is looking to have the complete version be operated with only one hand, CNET reported.
The students are hoping the final version of the clot buster will be battery-powered, and use both forward and reverse oscillations.
Huang said the clot buster cost about $20, Phys.org reported.
"Even though it could probably be reused, it's meant to be disposable," she stated.
