A new medical device that allows surgeons to more easily see while they maneuver around even the tiniest of spaces in the human body, has made TIME Magazine's list of the 200 best inventions of 2024.

Amplio is the world’s first wearable 3D full-color surgical microscope. It is a platform technology with capabilities that include surgical magnification, fluorescence imaging, night vision, surgical navigation, computer vision, artificial intelligence and augmented reality.

The UA-developed technology in Amplio improves the surgical lenses, known as loupes, that surgeons use during procedures, and it was developed by Dr. Yang Liu, who is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Iowa, and the Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Unifiy Medical.

But, Liu first started developing this groundbreaking new invention when he was with the University of Akron's Department of Biomedical Engineering, between 2013 and 2018.

To find out more about his new device, which will be commercially available sometime after the first quarter of 2025, we talked to both Dr. Liu, and the University of Akron's Acting Director of Technology Transfer, Kelly Bialek.