Knowlton and Team at Stanford Medicine Receive Prestigious ARPA-H Funding through White House Initiative

Lisa Knowlton, MD, MPH, is the co-recipient of up to $22.3 million award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to improve intraoperative anatomy visualization and critical structure identification. The prestigious five-year award will be led by Co-Principal Investigators Dr. Knowlton and Zhongming (Jeremy) Li, PhD, founding CEO of CisionVision, a medical device company in Mountain View, CA. 

“A real-time decision aid that provides surgeons with immediate critical structure anatomical labeling has the potential to save lives, reduce serious complications, improve surgical training and lower healthcare costs,” said Dr. Knowlton. “We are honored to collaborate with a multidisciplinary team of experts advancing the frontier of surgical imaging technology.”

CisionVision specializes in using shortwave infrared and hyperspectral imaging in medical diagnostics and intraoperatively to help surgeons visualize blood vessels, nerves, ducts and lymphatic structures. Hyperspectral imaging will be enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, allowing the surgical team to distinguish between tissue types without having to administer dyes or contrast agents to patients.

Stanford Medicine will be one of three clinical sites, along with John Hopkins University and Endeavor Health Northshore, conducting surgical implementation and evaluation. Teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Notre Dame will contribute computer science, engineering and AI expertise.

“We are proud to announce this first ARPA-H grant to be received by a PI in the Stanford Department of Surgery,” said Department Chair Mary Hawn, MD, FACS. “This award highlights the importance of Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Li’s pioneering work and underscores our Department’s commitment to advancing surgical innovation.”

Additional project investigators will include:

• John Hopkins University Assistant Professor of Surgery and Stanford General Surgery Residency Program Alumnus Jeffrey Jopling, MD, MSHS, an expert in computer vision 

• Danny Chen, PhD, a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame 

• Angela Belcher, PhD, James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering, Materials Science and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT

• Herbert Mason Hedberg, MD, and Monika Krezalek, MD, surgeons at Endeavor Health Northshore

• Arden Morris, MD, MPH, Professor of Surgery at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford-Surgery Policy Improvement Research Education Center (S-SPIRE) Center

ARPA-H, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was established by Congress and President Joe Biden in 2022 to make investments in breakthrough technologies and solutions with the potential to transform critical areas of medicine and health that cannot readily be accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity. This award is through ARPA-H's Precision Surgical Interventions (PSI) program, which aims to deliver groundbreaking tools enabling surgeons to successfully remove tumors through a single operation and reduce instances of unintentional injury to critical structures such as nerves, blood vessels or lymph ducts. The PSI program mandates that all performers design solutions that are compatible with all users, ensuring equitable access to the medical devices developed. 

The Biden-Harris administration announced awardees as part of President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

Dr. Knowlton is an Associate Professor of Surgery in Stanford’s Division of General Surgery’s Acute Care Surgery section and she serves as the Associate Chair of Research in the Stanford Department of Surgery. Her multidisciplinary research lab is also R01 funded by the National Institutes of Health. 

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