AccuSpine team members (back row, from left to right) Erica Schwarz, Clay Andrews, and Ravindra Gaddipati; and (front row, from left to right) Bradley Isaacs, Adarsha Malla, Anvesh Annadanam, and Luis Herrera, Eric Xie.

A Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering student team has placed second in the undergraduate division of the Collegiate Inventors Competitionfor its AccuSpine probe, marking the third consecutive year that a Johns Hopkins team has been awarded a top prize in this challenge.

The winners were announced Monday during an awards ceremony at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Va., after finalists presented their prototypes in a daylong exposition held by contest organizers Invent Now and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

AccuSpine, developed under physicians Chetan Bettegowda and Sheng-fu Larry Lo of the university’s School of Medicine, is a device that makes placement of screws during spinal fusion more accurate. The prototype, which has been tested on cadavers, has garnered nearly $85,000 in prize money at innovation challenges this year. This latest award, coveted among undergraduate and graduate inventors, includes a $10,000 prize.

Excerpted from The Hub. Read the complete story here.