Albert K. Chin

Albert K. "Al" Chin (born on May 5, 1953 in Spokane, Washington) is an American surgeon and medical device inventor. He is known as the “Father of EVH” for the invention of the VasoView device, which established the procedure of .
Education
Chin conducted general surgery residency training at UT Southwestern at Dallas, Parkland Memorial Hospital, with the intent of becoming a cardiovascular surgeon. However, he stopped midway through to rejoin his mentor, Tom Fogarty, in developing additional devices, including the Fogarty-Chin Angioscopic Valvulotome for in-situ saphenous vein bypass for peripheral arterial occlusive disease. In 1989, Chin joined Jay Watkins and Dr. Fred Moll as co-founders of a startup company Origin Medsystems, which was acquired by Eli Lilly and Company, and subsequently became the Cardiac Surgery division of Guidant, then Boston Scientific Cardiac Surgery, now part of the Getinge Group Chin is co-founder of the following companies: Pavilion Medical Innovations, Saphena Medical, Cruzar Medsystems, InnoVein, TAS Medical, and PercAssist.
Invention of Endoscopic Vessel Harvesting
In 1995, patients who underwent coronary bypass surgery often suffered wound infection complications following heart surgery, due to the full length skin incisions used to harvest the saphenous vein used as grafts to bypass diseased coronary arteries. The leg incisions were more painful than the open chest incision, and patients were unable to walk postoperatively. A few companies, including Johnson & Johnson and United States Surgical, were marketing skin retractors that harvested the saphenous vein through multiple small skin incisions.
While at Origin Medsystems, Chin contemplated a simple transparent conical tip that covered a rigid endoscope, to dissect the vein from surrounding connective tissue while constantly viewing the vein and the dozen branches emanating from the vein along its length. The tunnel surrounding the vein was kept open by infusion of pressurized carbon dioxide gas. When Chin first conceived the idea of a transparent dissection tip, he had to develop a prototype that would demonstrate the functionality of the concept. He purchased a glass pipette, broke off its long snout, and sealed the tip with a flame. When a 5 mm diameter telescope was inserted into the glass tip and placed in contact with a vein under the skin of a pig and a human cadaver, the resultant crystal clear image made it obvious that the device would successfully harvest a graft vessel via a 2 cm long incision. The transparent conical tip dissection device formed the basis of the VasoView instrumentation. Following endoscopic isolation of the vein and its tributaries or side branches, a Uniport cannula was used to manipulate the vein, cauterize and cut tributary attachments to allow removal of the saphenous vein via a knee incision. Laparoscopic bipolar electrocautery scissors or a bisector instrument was applied to seal and transect branch vessels.
Ten years following the introduction of the VasoView instrumentation, a direct current vessel sealing device, the HemoPro, was implemented to decrease the thermal spread exhibited by bipolar electrocautery cutters. The hot wire of the HemoPro device was surrounded by silicone rubber pads that compressed the tributary to limit thermal spread during the heating phase.
Endoscopic vessel harvesting techniques remained the same until 2014, when Saphena Medical introduced simplified instrumentation with its Venapax device. Mike Glennon, Mark Orphanos and Chin developed a one-piece cannula with few moving parts for decreased graft manipulation and facilitated adoption by new clinicians. The rotational blades of the cutting element applied high density radiofrequency bipolar energy with feedback control based on measured tissue impedance, to minimize thermal spread and tissue charring, as described in a recent clinical study.
Other inventions
Chin’s first invention, the Fogarty-Chin linear everting balloon catheter, has been used for balloon angioplasty, guidewire placement in arterial occlusions, and passage through the length of the Fallopian tube.
At Origin Medsystems and Guidant, Chin invented the following devices: Origin Cement Extraction System for revision total hip arthroplasty, Preperitoneal Dissection Balloon (PDB) and Blunt Tip Trocar (BTT) for laparoscopic inguinal hernia repair. He designed the X-pose Heart Positioner and HeartString Anasomotic Assist device for beating heart coronary bypass grafting, and the FLEXView device for endoscopic cardiac ablation to treat atrial fibrillation.
Awards
*MIT Innovation Contest, 3rd Place 1974
*UCSF School of Medicine, Dean’s Award for Research, 1983
*Stanford University, Emerging Entrepreneurs in Biomedical Technology, Ideals of Entrepreneurship Award, 2007
*Boston Patent Law Association Invented Here! Top Award 2018

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu