ProtectMed received a patent for a radiation shield to protect healthcare workers. [Photo: Adobe Stock]
Dallas-based ProtectMed LLC received a patent for a radiation shield that protects healthcare workers’ breast, underarm and thyroid tissue. The award came the week of Sept. 1, a week when North Texas ranked No. 10 among 250 metro areas for patent production.
The patent names three inventors: Dallas interventional radiologist Chet Rees, Fort Worth breast surgical oncologist Lauren Ramsey and Ryan Baldwin of Seattle. The design closely matches BAT, a lightweight radiation protection garment designed to safeguard the breast, axilla and thyroid of healthcare workers.
Ramsey serves as CEO and co-founder of ProtectMed LLC, which licenses the BAT technology to Virginia-based Burlington Medical. Ramsey and Rees discussed the design in a video on the Burlington Medical website.
“I had a friend and a colleague who died from breast cancer at a young age. She was an orthopedic surgeon so was around a lot of radiation exposure. It prompted me to do a lot of research,” Ramsey said. “…I hope that we’re able to educate people about the risk of radiation exposure and breast cancer and able to provide physicians and other healthcare providers with a way to reduce that risk and hopefully reduce the risk of breast cancer.”
In a research study, Rees and colleagues at Baylor University Medical Center tested the BAT shield on an anthropomorphic acrylic female torso in a simulated procedure room. The results were published in the journal Health Physics.
More North Texas inventions
Other North Texas companies with notable patents the week of Sept. 1 include:
Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas) and Samsung Electronics Co. tied for the most patents that week with seven. received seven patents, tying for the most among companies in the region.
Lhoist North America Inc. (Fort Worth) received a patent for a hydrated lime used for carbon capture. The company was founded in 1889 and produces lime, dolime and process materials used in water treatment, soil stabilization, emission control and other industrial activities.
RedCritter Corp. (Flower Mound) received a patent for a system that lets school administrators control autonomous safety robots using prompts. The architecture can include a management server, a management portal and a number of robots for patrolling a school environment. This patent follows a May award for a mechanism that distributes non-fungible tokens to students.
Verily Health Inc. (Dallas), which raised a $300 million investment round in March, won a patent for techniques that authorize programming of an implanted medical device. The techniques use a wireless communication protocol to ensure someone using an external device is authorized to connect and is connecting to the correct implantable medical device.
Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America Inc. (Plano) received three patents that week. They include a design patent for a vehicle wheel and two utility patents, one for the automatic detection and validation of transport service and one for anisotropic elastic metamaterials.
Patent information is provided by Joe Chiarella, founder of patent analytics company Patent Index and publisher of The Inventiveness Index. For additional details on the patents granted below, search the USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database.
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