I spent the day hanging out with Billy Mishaun and the kids doing different stuff. First Billy and I went to the center for device innovation (CDI) his workshop for biomedical entrepreneurs. My nephew Chris has a job there now and is crushing it.

Billy has a collection of a lot of his inventions, including this which is a device for central line insertion that he and I built over Covid. It’s the foundation for a company called Obvius robotics.

here are just some of the iterations we went through 

there was a team of reporters and a photographer there to get billys survival story. he’s a huge deal in houston.. in the feild. in the world. and his miraculous recovery from such a devastating health issue makes him an even huger thing. .I

there were lots of pics and vids of billy doign stuff. playign gutiar, talkign to chirs, showing his inventions.. it truly is an amazing story

theres a virtual museum in there of billys inventions.. 

his office is a very fun hot mess

His latest project is to try to get flow videos of a model of the Bivacor heart spinning in an MRI machine . It can’t have anything ferrous in it because of the magnet and it can’t be made out of metal because we need to be able to see it so he’s 3-D printed a version of the pump that has the same internal geometries

Billy and I headed out after the interview to get lunch and to go test this thing in the MRI.… You drove by the old Astrodome. Brings back memories.

We went to a really great sushi restaurant… It’s pretty funny. We walked in and some woman was sitting there and she jumped up sort of standard “you’re alive!”… Everybody knows Billy story here… She’s some sort of a innovation officer at one of these places and everybody is amazed to see him up and walking around and working.

After lunch, we went to Billy’s radiology friends. They had a 1.5 Tesla MRI and we had it for several hours just to goof around. There was an amazing radiology tech there and she had some great ideas on how to get contrast in this device. Basically, we filled it with ultrasonic glue that’s used to image body cavities… We put the device inside the magnet and start imaging… What came out was amazing. Billy and Kris are now working on more complete model that will be watertight and will actually have a motor driving it… Though the motor has to be in a completely different room because of the magnetic field. We had to take off all metal before we walked in there… It’s serious business people are killed every couple of years by walking in with metal chains around their neck or something like that, they get sucked into the magnet.

then we started gettign images.. it was very cool !

From there, we went to the end event… It was fun seeing everybody who got talk, but by the time the tox had really started Billy was running out of steam. He still tires very easily so he went back to the house and did take out. It was nice seeing our friends and me though.

One strange and sad thing as we drove up to the house, we got out of the car and there was a little kitten there… It didn’t look very well. It hadn’t been hurt or anything, but it walked under the car and wouldn’t come out… CSean and Billy and I tried to get it out and even tried to feed it, but it wouldn’t eat or anything… The poor thing didn’t make it through the night. It was a stray and we couldn’t quite figure out what it happened to it… It was really sad.

Berto did take out from a really amazing vegan place for us… super good 

wonderful visit.. heading home in the morning. 
really glad I came down even for such a short visit 

nnite all. nite sam
-me