ACCEL
ACCEL
The CDC estimates that 75 million endoscopies are performed every year in the United States alone. After every single operation, the endoscope must be rigorously washed, disinfected,and sterilized to prevent cross contamination between patients. In recent years, hospitals have implemented harsher cleaning protocols to speed up endoscope reprocessing, however, after 5-7years of use in a corrosive medical environment, endoscope surfaces degrade. This induces unsightly discoloration and creates problems with traceability as the serial numbers on the endoscopes become illegible. When designing new products, engineers at Karl Storz Imaging cannot wait for years to determine if their products will survive in the field, and manually simulating the damage from cleaning endoscopes requires extensive man hours. Our automated reprocessing device allows engineers to simulate years of endoscope degradation at an accelerated rate where, for example, 5 years of degradation can be reproduced in just 5 days.