Less than 1 year after German Physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays, J. William White, chief of surgery; Charles Lester Leonard, Penn’s first radiologist and physicist Arthur Goodspeed published the first medical image and applications of x-rays.

Charles Chapple, MD creates the first incubator for care of infants at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The device, later named the “isolette” has remained a mainstay of modern neonatal medicine since that time.

While a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, Christian James Lambertsen developed an underwater breathing apparatus. With Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s invention of the regulator in 1943, it was later named SCUBA

David E. Kuhl, Luke Chapman, and Roy Edwards constructed and performed the first positron emission tomography (PET) scans at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrating the role of functional and metabolic measurements in medicine. 

William J. Rashkind, MD invents the balloon septostomy, a life saving procedure to acutely treat children with congenital heart defects at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Luigi Mastroianni Jr. and his colleagues helped to advance the field of in vitro fertilization through their research and, in 1983, he performed the first successful human in vitro fertilization in the Greater Philadelphia region

N. Scott Adzick, MD, Surgeon in Chief at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pioneers fetal surgery at CHOP. As of 2015 Dr. Adzick and his team performed over 1250 operations on fetuses for heart, brain, lung and other conditions.

The Trans Orbital Robotic Surgery technique for head and neck surgery was first developed by Drs. Gregory Weinstein and Bert O'Malley Jr. at the University of Pennsylvania.

Investigators at the University of Pennsylvania have developed flexible, transparent and dissolvable electronics that are used for a variety of consumer and medical applications.

Maxim Itkin of Penn Medicine and Yoav Dori of CHOP develop and published techniques and for advanced lymphatic imaging and percutaneous treatment of lymphatic plastic bronchitis and other disorders, giving rise to a new field.

The NeuroPace Responsive Neurostimulator System (RNS) is the first implantable responsive device to treat medication resistant epilepsy. It is now implanted in over 1,000 patients in the United States.  A team of physicians and engineers from Penn and Georgia Tech, led by Brian Litt, MD, developed algorithms that were the precursors of those eventually embodied in this device.

Alan Flake, MD, Emily Partridge, MD and Marcus G. Davey, MD demonstrate feasibility of an artificial womb to treat premature infants at the Childrens’ Hospital of Philadelphia.