The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) chosen AI-GUIDE, a medical system developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Massachusetts Normal Hospital (MGH), for its 2026 Excellence in Know-how Switch Award. This award acknowledges federal laboratories and collaborators who’ve achieved excellent work within the technique of transferring expertise. With funding from the U.S. Military’s Fight Casualty Care Analysis Program (CCC), Lincoln Laboratory and MGH developed AI-GUIDE and are within the technique of transferring the prototype to the startup firm AutonomUS Medical Applied sciences, Inc.
“This recognition displays what efficient expertise switch appears like — aligning the Military’s operational want with Mass Normal’s medical experience and Lincoln Laboratory’s engineering capabilities to ship an answer with a transparent path to affect. The transition to AutonomUS underscores how robust partnerships can carry a expertise from improvement into real-world adoption,” says Asha Rajagopal, Lincoln Laboratory’s chief expertise switch officer.
AI-GUIDE’s transition to trade guarantees improved well being outcomes for injured service members and civilians. Not like ultrasound units sometimes present in hospitals, AI-GUIDE is small and moveable, making it supreme to be used in pre-hospital settings. Pairing custom-developed AI software program with industrial handheld ultrasound expertise, AI-GUIDE helps the person insert a guidewire and catheter right into a affected person’s blood vessel. This functionality is particularly necessary for U.S. navy medics, who should maintain injured troopers alive within the subject — generally for days — earlier than they are often evacuated to a hospital. AI-GUIDE permits medics with minimal specialised coaching to manage medical interventions that will in any other case be inconceivable outdoors of the hospital, drastically enhancing sufferers’ probabilities of survival.
The AI-GUIDE challenge has served as a framework for efficient expertise improvement and switch. Inside simply three years, AI-GUIDE went from an concept proposed by CCC to a totally working proof-of-concept expertise with its personal startup firm. As soon as the prototype was developed, medical testing at MGH proved its viability, and Lincoln Laboratory and MGH workers then based AutonomUS Medical Applied sciences to facilitate the commercialization course of. With assist from the MIT Know-how Licensing Workplace, Lincoln Laboratory Know-how Switch Workplace, and CCC, the corporate secured U.S. Meals and Drug Administration (FDA) Breakthrough System Designation, a regulatory fast-track pathway that’s solely granted to extremely progressive applied sciences with lifesaving potential, in addition to a Small Enterprise Innovation Analysis grant from the U.S. Division of the Air Drive and funding from non-public traders, the Division of Warfare, and the Nationwide Institutes of Well being.
These robust expertise switch collaborations are designed to streamline the switch course of, making certain that lifesaving capabilities might be made out there to navy personnel and civilians as shortly as doable. Whereas a lot of the preliminary work on vascular entry has already been transferred, the AI-GUIDE group continues to develop and transition extra capabilities, together with peripheral nerve block expertise for trauma care and ache administration. AI-GUIDE has beforehand been acknowledged with a Lincoln Laboratory Greatest Invention Award and an R&D 100 Award.
“Lincoln Laboratory has an extended file of transferring expertise to trade. We’re honored and proud to be acknowledged for the switch of AI‑GUIDE and sit up for seeing the expertise commercialized and saving lives within the subject. This achievement displays the power of the partnership among the many Protection Well being Company, Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Normal Hospital, and AutonomUS Medical Applied sciences,” says Samuel Kesner, a technical workers member within the Methods Engineering Group, who at present oversees the AI-GUIDE program at Lincoln Laboratory.
Successful group members from the laboratory embrace Brian Telfer, Samuel Kesner, Lars Gjesteby, Joshua Werblin, Benjamin Roop, Alec Carruthers, Nancy DeLosa, and former Lincoln Laboratory workers members Matt Johnson (now the vice chairman of engineering at AutonomUS) and Laura Brattain (now an affiliate professor on the College of Central Florida). Asha Rajagopal, Jordan Mizerak, Melly Coronado, and Jonathan Dan supported expertise switch efforts.
