Breathing life-saving services into rural communities

The situation in Peru was grim during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The South American country produces very few of its own medical supplies and without adequate equipment to treat patients, it soon had the world’s highest COVID-19 death rate per capita.

“One of the most critical needs was mechanical ventilators,” says Fabiola León-Velarde, then-president of Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (CONCYTEC), Peru’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation. “The virus severely damaged the lungs, and many patients required mechanical ventilation to survive while their lungs recovered.”

But the nation of 33 million people had fewer than 250 mechanical ventilators available to treat patients. When CONCYTEC launched a call for proposals for help creating ventilators and other essential medical services to fight the pandemic, Professor Benjamín Castañeda ’09 (PhD) from the University of Rochester’s Department of Biomedical Engineering answered. Then a professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), one of Peru’s most prestigious universities, Castañeda devised a plan to rapidly design and manufacture hundreds of ventilators to support critically ill patients.

“We built them from scratch, not knowing anything about mechanical ventilators,” says Castañeda. “We turned PUCP’s gym into a factory and produced 350 for use in 23 hospitals across the country. Peru didn’t have a medical device industry, so this was the first mechanical medical device designed, tested, approved for use, and fabricated in Peru.”

The project is emblematic of Castañeda’s career: bringing medical technology to people who would otherwise not have access. León-Velarde credits Castañeda’s leadership in navigating the complex regulatory landscape and bringing together a multidisciplinary team of engineers, medical professionals, and policymakers to make the project happen.

“These ventilators were deployed to public hospitals at a critical time when every additional device meant a chance to save more lives,” she says. “Their impact went beyond the immediate crisis—they also demonstrated the potential of local scientific and technological innovation in responding to national emergencies.”

Castañeda attended PUCP as an undergraduate, staying active as chair of the university’s student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). By organizing the chapter’s events, he made important contacts with faculty across the globe, including at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he would pursue a master’s in computer engineering.

While at RIT, Castañeda found an idol and mentor downriver in Kevin Parker, the William F. May Professor of Engineering at Rochester’s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. Soon Castañeda enrolled at Rochester to pursue a PhD in electrical and computer engineering.

Castañeda developed deep expertise in biomedical ultrasound during his time studying under Parker’s guidance. While completing his dissertation on extracting information from sonoelastography, a novel hybrid imaging technique developed by Parker’s lab, Castañeda weighed opportunities in the United States and back home.

“I’ve always wanted to make an impact on society,” he says. “Even though I would have many opportunities in the US as a PhD, I felt that going back to Peru would allow me to make a bigger impact, even if I had access to fewer resources.”

He discussed establishing a medical-imaging laboratory with PUCP and began teaching summer courses there in 2008. A grant from a Peruvian network of universities allowed Castañeda to travel the country, learning about its health care needs and identifying ways to apply his expertise.

That is when he first saw rural areas as a potential niche for his research. In Peru’s mountains and jungles, there is limited access to the internet and medical professionals. Indeed, it can take hours of difficult travel to reach the nearest hospitals.

“Designing technology for rural areas is much different than designing for state-of-the-art university medical centers,” says Castañeda. “You have to take into account the resources that are available and what is not.”

When he joined the PUCP faculty in 2009, he focused his lab on creating point-of-care medical devices that work in rural settings. By augmenting biomedical ultrasound technology with photogrammetry and artificial intelligence techniques, they were able to help diagnose and treat chronic ailments prevalent in such places in Peru, including diabetic feet, tuberculosis, and wounds caused by parasitic diseases.

Castañeda climbed the ranks to full professor at PUCP, served as director of academic affairs for the School of Science and Engineering, and launched an undergraduate program in biomedical engineering. All the while, he maintained research collaborations with Parker and partners at the University of Rochester Medical Center, including Thomas Marini, an assistant professor in the Department of Imaging Sciences.

The COVID-19 pandemic grew interest in tele-ultrasound research, so Castañeda expanded an ambitious project with hopes of bringing prenatal and breast-cancer imaging to millions of women in rural Peru. The lack of ultrasound access leads to high maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality as well as delayed diagnosis of breast cancer.

Castañeda formed a team that included collaborators from the Medical Center and Johns Hopkins Medicine. Kathryn Drennan, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, joined three years ago, intrigued by the parallel challenges in her home state of Alaska, where many rural towns are only accessible by bush plane or boat.

Rather than having patients travel long distances to receive care or deploying specialists to sparsely populated areas where needs are infrequent, the project leverages generally trained community health workers.

“They can do a broad variety of tasks, so the idea is that through augmented reality–assisted training plus an AI boost, they can get the images that allow qualified physicians to remotely triage while the patients stay local,” says Drennan.

Already the project has impacted thousands of lives, deploying the technology in 24 Peruvian clinics through partnerships with the Peruvian government, perinatal and cancer institutes, and local universities. The team is pursuing further funding to refine the technology and expand its implementation throughout the country via public policy.

“Ben is so smart in the way he can imagine an idea, bring a team together, and make everybody feel good about accomplishing that goal,” says Drennan. “It’s inspiring.”

Castañeda joined the Rochester faculty in fall 2024, establishing the Global Health and Medical Devices Lab. “In Peru, I was at a stage in which I had reached a ceiling,” he says. “Coming back to Rochester gives me the opportunity to still focus on low-resource settings and global health but with more means at my disposal.”

Already, he has established a new three-year collaborative research agreement between Rochester and PUCP to advance the ultrasound project and promote exchanges of faculty as well as undergraduate and graduate students. Stefano Romero, one of Castañeda’s first students at PUCP and now a professor and head of the Digital Signal Processing Lab there, was the first to come to Rochester through the agreement in February.

For three months at Rochester, Romero will conduct ultrasound and elastography experiments to refine the AI techniques that identify potential lesions. He believes Castañeda’s leadership is a boon to both universities.“We want to preserve these connections between the universities for generations of students,” Romero says. “We’re building exciting opportunities for students from both Rochester and Peru to see different perspectives on health outcomes that we believe will be transformative.”