Novel navigation system for arthroscopy offers licensing agreements and joint-venture agreements.

Annotation

Portuguese start-up company, developer of intellectual property based in computer vision knowledge, has developed a navigation technology that is the first effective image-based solution for navigation in arthroscopy, is looking for partners for licensing agreements and joint-venture agreements.

Offer description

Portuguese company specialized in advance knowledge in computer vision to offer innovative embedded image-software features for improving visualization and assisting the surgeon during minimally invasive medical procedures is looking for partners interested in joint-venture agreements or license agreements. This start-up won the Life Science of MIT Portugal (partnership of Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Portuguese Universities) venture competition “Building global innovators”. The intra-operative video is processed in real-time for extracting meaningful guidance information and enhancing visualization beyond the limits of optics. The software modules can be seamlessly integrated in both new and existing camera equipment thanks to the calibration technology developed by the Portuguese company that enable full understanding about how the image is formed. The global surgical navigation market has been growing and with a large addressable market, surgical navigation solutions are set to penetrate ambulatory surgery centers, day care centers, and private clinics. This market is dominated by a few large companies. Due to the increase demand it is expected that the number of strategic partnerships between surgical navigation manufacturers with imaging manufacturers will increase. The company defined in its business model that its growth strategy is based on co-development contracts to integrate their software modules, with imaging manufacturer interfaces, for which the Portuguese company is open to a joint-venture agreement. After this integration, the company expects to receive a license fee per each product sold. The company is also open to licensing agreements with endoscopes manufacturers and producers of medical devices.

Innovations and advantages

The technology developed by the Portuguese company is the first navigation solution that eliminates the need of external optical tracking of camera/tools, or the need of expensive capital equipment for imagiology in the operating room. By using this camera calibration technology and advance computer vision techniques the navigation can be done using video information only and the captured endoscopic image provides all the necessary geometric information. The increase in minimally invasive surgery procedures and number of new surgeons adopting it, along with the associated added complexity in execution and learning curve, is driving the need for technologies to assist the surgeon during execution, in order to reduce the procedures complexity and increase their accuracy and success rate. The solution developed for processing the arthroscopic video is targeted to the market of hospitals and small clinics and since the solution installations does not require any capital equipment, this solution is affordable and accessible to every surgeon. This patented technology is the result of years of research in geometric computer vision, combining accuracy and automatic operation to bring the power of image based software applications to the Operating Room.

Technology keywords

01004001 Applications for Health

Market application codes

05001007 Other diagnostic
05002005 Other medical imaging
05004006 Surgical instrumentation and equipment
05005019 Surgery and Anaesthesiology
05005021 Medical computer sciences

Intellectual property rights

Patent(s) applied for but not yet granted

Comments, number and date of patent

This is a patent pending technology for the development of surgical navigation systems based on video image to be used in open or arthroscopic procedures.

Profile date

16.03.2019