Associate Professor of Pediatric Otolaryngology Tulio Valdez, MD, MSc, has dedicated most of his academic career to developing tools to improve diagnostic certainty. His research had been focused on developing tools to better diagnose ear infections, one of the most common problems in children.

As a new faculty joining Stanford in 2017, he wanted to meet other researchers in the medical community who had the same entrepreneurial spirit as he did and shared a passion for health technology. Dr. Valdez learned about the Biodesign Faculty Fellowship and embraced this opportunity to make connections with other faculty from the medical community, train in health technology innovation, and learn how to effectively approach health problems. He was accepted to the 2019 Biodesign Faculty Fellowship, sponsored in part by the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute.

For his Biodesign project, Dr. Valdez wanted to find a better way to diagnose otitis media – a middle-ear condition which is the most common cause of pediatric hearing loss, surgeries, and antibiotic prescriptions. Diagnosing otitis media in pediatric patients is not an easy task which carries very low diagnostic certainty, resulting in the prescription of antibiotics when they may not be necessary.

“I wanted to see how I could approach the problem differently from the medical needs side rather than from the technology side,” says Dr. Valdez, who developed new imaging technology to diagnose ear infections in children at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before coming to Stanford. “The Biodesign Faculty Fellowship changed my understanding to first, find a problem and see if it’s a problem, and then see if there’s a need for the solution.”

Dr. Valdez identified the unmet needs within this area and examined the diagnostic devices in the market as well as other solutions for diagnosing ear infections – an essential phase in the design and development of medical devices.

“The whole idea of the Biodesign innovation is that you have to allow the process to work, and to be able to do that you have to be ruthless even with your inventions,” he says. Throughout the process, he dissected the problem and studied the technology, helping him to see how certain aspects of the project could be flagged as problematic for translating into an actual product due to costs. 

“We started thinking how we can change our device on the engineering side that would still allow us to have a high diagnostic certainty while reducing the cost of the device,” says Dr. Valdez. He proposed this in his final Biodesign project and received a $10,000 grant to use toward developing the tool.

Since completing the program in June of 2019, he has sought other grant opportunities to support the project. Currently, he is working on developing the next generation of the diagnostic tool, one that would reduce the cost for use in examination and diagnosis of patients.

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