Aba man recieves Award for invention

Dr. Samuel Achilefu, of Washington University in St. Louis.

CREDIT DURRIE BOUSCAREN | ST. LOUIS PUBLIC RADIO

Achilefu said the idea for the goggles was borrowed from other medical disciplines and born out of a need to reduce the number of instruments in a surgery room.

“Ophthalmologists use glasses. Neurosurgeons do the same thing, but with large microscopes,” Achilefu said. “The idea was what is the simplest device to create that is easy to use but still effective.”

Developing the goggles became a three year collaboration between radiologists, optical and sensory engineers, and surgeons — a fitting development for the same radiology institute that invented the PET scan.

The St. Louis Award is given each year to honor a resident who has made an “outstanding contribution” to the community. Achilefu accepted his during a ceremony Wednesday evening in St. Louis.

Speaking by phone with St. Louis Public Radio, award committee president David Kemper said, “It just seemed natural,” to choose Achilefu for the honor.

“None of us knew him, but we knew of what was going on. We thought, ‘Well, isn’t this fascinating, what a great contribution to society,’” Kemper said.

Achilefu grew up in the city of Aba, in southeastern Nigeria. After winning a government scholarship to study in France, he completed his studies at Oxford University before following a longtime mentor to the Mallinckrodt lab in 1993. He lives in the St. Louis area with his wife and two teenage children.

“I’m a good example that if you place anybody in a place and ask them to survive, they will. They will adapt to that language,” Achilefu joked. He speaks three languages fluently: Igbo, English and French.

As for the future of the goggles, Achilefu said he’d like to see them become easily accessible to low-resource areas, such as urban centers and rural hospitals. He and his colleagues are gathering data to apply for FDA approval.

“I hope that in other developing parts of the world that can’t afford imaging technologies, this becomes affordable and useful for them,” he said.

Another step will be adapting the goggles to magnify the surgeon’s view to streamline brain surgeries. Achilefu said that ideally, the image would be sharp enough to be magnified so that even a single cell could be identified by a neurosurgeon.

“Medicine becomes more objective if you can see what you are treating.” Achilefu said. “You have the confidence you are doing the right thing to the patient.”