Medivis

A Big Picture Problem 🗺️

The Quandary of Progress

The Dilemma

• Current State: Some surgical outcomes are referred to as "never events,” because they are supposed to never happen. Mistakes like leaving a piece of equipment in someone, operating on the wrong body part or performing the wrong procedure on the correct body body. In 2013, researchers from John Hopkins estimated “never events” occur more than 4,000 times each year in the United States alone, and less egregious errors happen far more frequently.

• Complications: Surgical mistakes can happen for a number of reasons: fatigue, stress, distractions, miscommunication, information overload, insufficient planning, inadequate training. As medical technologies continues to improve, surgeons are able to perform procedures with increasing complexity, which is a double-edged sword. One the one hand, it allows surgeons to tackle previously inoperable conditions and improve patient outcomes. On the other hand, it also increases the risk of errors, which can have devastating consequences, even if the errors are minor rather than “never events.”

• Consequences: The increasing complexity of surgeries may lead to a higher risk of errors, which can have a negative ripple effect on patient trust and surgical outcomes. For example, if patients become less confident in the safety of surgical procedures, they may be more likely to opt-out of less risky surgeries, which would drive up the average difficulty of surgical cases. This, in turn, would create a self-reinforcing cycle of errors, where the increasing complexity of surgeries fuels a higher risk of mistakes, and vice versa.

Searching For A Solution 📡

Medivis

The Basics

• Mission: To improve the lives of patients by ushering in a new visual era for medicine.

• Summary: Build augmented reality (AR) tooling to help surgeons and support staff perform better procedures in the operating room.

• Year Founded: 2016.

The Framework

• Solution(s): Medivis is a two-sided platform. The first side visualizes a 3D holographic image of a patient's anatomy mapped directly onto their body in real-time. The second side is a collection of information and curriculum about the human anatomy seen through high-definition 3D models to improve the way students learn and professionals train.

• Strategy: Medivis’ dual platform approach is their attempt to build a comprehensive ecosystem for medical surgery by becoming the standard of choice assistive tool at every stage in a surgeon’s career. When the surgeon is still a medical school student, they will learn through Medivis’ AR educational platform; when they are in residency or preparing for their first procedures, they will train and rehearse through Medivis’ platform; when they are in the operating room with a patient, they will use Medivis to overlay all the information they may need to ensure they are taking the best steps possible to perform a successful surgery.

• Signal: Medivis reports 2,000+ surgeries have been performed using their product, and the technology has been deployed in 40+ hospitals, medical schools and partnership groups, such as the Veterans Health Administration and MD Anderson.

The Team

• Founder(s):

  • Chief Executive Officer - Osamah Choudhry.

    • Previously:

      • Medical Doctor, Neurosurgeon

      • Clinical Assistant Professor @ NYU.

  • Chief Science Officer - Christopher Morley.

    • Previously:

      • Medical Doctor, Radiologist

      • Diagnostic Radiology Residency @ NYU.

• Headquarters: New York City, New York, United States

• # Of Employees: 11 - 50

Click the button below to request an introduction to the founder

The Channels

• Socials: LinkedIn.

• Website: https://www.medivis.com

• Resources: Patents. Clinical Research.

Risk Alerts ⚠️

The Threats

• Commercial Risk: Game engines like Unity and Unreal Engines are making it remarkably easy for teams and individuals to create 2D and 3D games, simulations, and interactive experiences in AR and other modalities. These powerful developer platforms will introduce more competition for Medivis to contend with and differentiate from, because large hospitals and clinics will be able to build their own AR software solutions relatively easily, and smaller healthcare providers will encounter a number of alternative options that may be better at one or more evaluation metrics when compared to Medivis.

• Technical Risk: AR systems in operating rooms are useful because they precisely track or capture information from the real-world and register it in a virtual context. However, any inaccuracies in these systems, even on a sub-millimeter scale, could lead to critical mistakes during training, planning and delicate procedures such as neurosurgery and spinal surgery. Furthermore, a surgeon's operating room needs to follow incredibly strict sterilization practices to prevent infections and contamination. Consumer-oriented AR headsets are bulky and were not designed to meet sterilization requirements, and it is unclear what comfort or performance trade-offs are necessary with AR headsets purpose-built for assistive surgery.

• Comparable To:

  • VisAR.

  • Augmedics.

  • Surgical Theater.

Deal Tracker 🧮

The Cap Table

• Series: A.

• Raised: $25 million USD total.

• Investors: Led by Thrive Capital and Initialized Capital. Participation from Coalition Operators, 35V, Mayo Clinic and others.

Market Insights 💡

The Landscape

• Recent News: Incorporating AR technology for spine surgery training and planning is particularly popular because of how difficult it is to operate on that of the body. There are case studies from Ohio State, UConn Health, John Hopkins and countless others to describe their spinal surgery experiences with AR tech.

• Growth Rates: According to a report by GlobalNewswire, the global AR and VR in healthcare market was only valued at $580 million USD in 2022. However, the market projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 42.4% from 2022 to 2030, until it reaches a valuation of $6.94 billion USD.

• Ecosystem Dynamics: Whenever a new technology or mechanism is introduced into a medical setting to collect patient data, there are numerous ethical, legal and privacy considerations to sort through before the innovation can reach a critical mass. AR technology is no different insofar it is unclear how to handle the collection, storage, and use of highly detailed simulations of a patient's organs and bodily functions. While these simulations could be valuable for training and real-time operations, generic simulations may have limited utility for healthcare providers, but without explicit patient consent, the legal implications of using this sort of data are not yet resolved.

Industry Trends 📊

The Indicators

• Catalysts: Apple's Vision Pro and Meta’s Oculus are two consumer-oriented platforms that will push the entire spatial computing industry forward. Big Tech giants are investing billions dollars into R&D to improve display technology, hand tracking, and spatial awareness, and the reverberating effects will create more intuitive and cost-effective AR surgical systems once frontier features are standardized.

• Challenges: Before an AR-enhanced operation on a live patient can take place, there must first be comprehensive training programs for surgeons and support staff to learn how to incorporate the technology into their procedures and IT infrastructure. This can be more complex than it appears, because it requires a cultural shift for lifelong professionals to adapt to new technologies. This transition can be difficult because AR technologies may be challenging or inconvenient for some to use effectively and reliably early on, which can create more hesitancy to eventually bring the technology in a live operating room.

• Recommended Reading: The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris chronicles the life and work of a pioneering surgeon who changed the field of medicine in the 19^th century by introducing antiseptic practices to make Victorian-era surgeries a little less gruesome and dangerous.

A Toolkit To Go 🛠️

The Equipment

• 🎮 Unity - A game engine that offers a suite of tools and features to create 2D and 3D games, simulations, and interactive experiences in AR and other modalities.

• 🤖 OpenCV - An open-source computer vision library that provides image processing capabilities such as real-time image analysis and object orientation suitable for a variety of applications, including AR.

• 🗞️ The Aurorean Newsletter - Our team’s weekly roundup of STEM’s most significant stories of progress. We scour 100+ sources so you don’t have to.

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Share Your Thoughts 💬

The Community Wisdom

The results are in from our poll last week. Brimestone is a company on a mission to accelerate the clean industrial revolution by producing cement with a potential net negative impact to climate emissions. The following is a snapshot of the sentiments our audience felt about them.

• Bulls 61%

  • Subscriber Perspective: 'It's extremely impressive that a young company with relatively unknown founders managed to win such a large government grant and raise so much capital to scale up it’s production capacity. That is a massive vote of confidence in their product quality and potential. Moreover, society's need to decarbonize industrial processes will practically force feed them all the customers they can handle for the foreseeable future. Must be nice.’

• Bears 39%

  • Subscriber Perspective: ‘Didn’t realize China produced and consumed so much of world’s cement, though I shouldn’t be surprised. Considering the country’s market is larger than the rest of the world combined, and the nation’s decarbonization efforts are on par with (if not outright outpacing) both the European Union and the United States, hyper scalable green cement solutions will be created in China. Since the country’s market is so much larger than every other place on Earth, the market leaders in China will have unit economic advantages to offer cheaper products at similar quality than what Brimestone and other competitors can afford. This may be a moot point in the end, as various global trade policies are attempting to onshore the production of critical supplies and products, and cement may fall under this category. But it is still a risk.’