The 2017 MedTech Boston 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovators

17. Jayender Jagadeesan, PhD
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School; Research Associate, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Associate Member, Broad Institute
“Robotics in the field of surgery is no doubt taking us a step forward,” declares Jayender Jagadeesan of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. More than most, he would know. Jagadeesan’s at the forefront of robotic and image-guided therapy and surgery—that is, using mixed and augmented reality tools to help surgeons make better diagnoses and improve patient outcomes. It’s a ground-breaking approach.

Jagadeesan completed his PhD at the University of Western Ontario and his Bachelors of Technology (B.Tech.) at the Indian Institute of Technology. It was during his graduate studies that he began to see the potential of robotics and other advanced technologies to augment the skills of a surgeon. Jagadeesan pursued this passion further by way of postdoctoral research at both Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.

“My first exposure to healthcare was during my PhD, when I was designing and building robotic technologies with haptic feedback for performing catheter insertion,” he recollects. “During my postdoctoral research, I wanted to investigate technologies that could enhance the vision of the surgeon, which led me to developing surgical navigation systems. Together, robotics and surgical navigation could be integrated to enhance the dexterity and vision of the surgeons.”

Asked about his current efforts, Jagadeesan explains, “The goal of my work is to allow the surgeons to see beyond the visual field to determine the boundaries of the tumor and the neighboring sensitive structures. This can ensure complete removal of the tumor while sparing the surrounding tissue. One of the objectives of my work is combine information from multiple imaging sources and provide context-specific information to the surgeon in real-time. This led us to explore the possibility of using mixed and augmented reality devices to provide such feedback to the surgeon.”

He continues, “In the the next 5 years, I am hoping to solve some of the most difficult problems that have prevented the use of navigation systems for general surgical applications. Developing such systems is a non-trivial task, given the tremendous deformation of tissue during surgery. We are specifically hoping to develop solutions for guiding the resection of lung and breast cancer, two surgical procedures that would benefit enormously with enhanced surgical guidance. We will also explore the role of mixed and augmented reality devices for providing context-specific information to surgeons in real-time.”

Outside of work, Jagadeesan enjoys playing badminton, reading, and cooking,