RALEIGH, NC / ACCESSWIRE / January 4, 2022 / Our hospitals are a far cry from the days when they did not have facilities to sufficiently clean the hands of physicians or the wounds of patients. Now over 300 million major procedures are performed each year globally. $500M is spent across a small fraction to assess if blood flow is adequate before closing procedures.
Shown: Visualization of coronary blood flow speeds (left).
Latest imaging head unit on future optional robotic arm (right).
As far as medicine has come, surgeons still lack a quick way to quantitatively assess if blood flow in their patients is good or bad during procedures. This inability can lead to missed complications during heart bypasses, organ transplants, and many other surgeries, which can lead to costly readmissions and longer recoveries.
To help patients to have safer, more optimal outcomes, Scinovia, founded by its CEO, Jim Sund (PhD, MBA), has created VUFLOW, a technology which aims to provide surgeons with real-time, non-contact readings of blood flow.
The Problem: Knowing if Blood Flow Is Good or Needs Attention
Scinovia believes that the issue with today's technology for measuring blood flow is that it's outdated. "It has been around since the early 1960s and centers on using ultrasound probe technologies or chemical dyes," the company states. "At the time it was all invented, it was certainly helpful, but now, with the resources we have in 2021, we believe that it is time to upgrade the technology that surgeons use to faster, non-contact, and more data-driven methods."
This is crucial, Scinovia continues, because case studies have shown that visualizing blood flow during surgeries can substantially assist in predicting if poor outcomes may occur. For example, tissue death in breast reconstruction was reduced by more than half, from 14% to 6%, saving approximately $100K per case.
What Is VUFLOW?
To solve these issues, Scinovia has created VUFLOW, a mobile imaging system that enables surgeons to visualize actual blood flow speeds in surface vessels. The quantitative results aim to assist in data-driven verification that a heart bypass or other vascular procedures ended with optimal blood flow. Its non-contact design increases safety and allows surgeons to conduct multiple measurements during a procedure without the risk of chemical toxicity of dyes or physical damage of probes manipulating fragile vessels.
Scinovia has begun integration of Kuka's (KUKA) medical grade robotic arm.
VUFLOW R will be an optional robotics upgrade to provide surgeons with automated targeting, parking, and return-to-previous-location ability. The company predicts that Kuka's 7-degrees-of-freedom medical robotic arm will increase precision, measurement accuracy, and surgeon usability.
Creators of hyper-dimensional computer vision algorithms, such as Tesla (TSLA) for autonomous driving and Scinovia for real-time visualization of physiology, employ powerful GPU technologies from NVIDIA (NVDA). Scinovia codes advanced algorithms on this GPU technology to help compute high frame rates of images and deliver real-time tracking of anatomy, e.g., beating heart, physiology, and pulsing blood flow speeds.
Through the reporting of "absolute" blood flow speeds, Scinovia believes that doctors will be able to identify speed thresholds that correlate or predict post-surgery tissue death (necrosis) and thus take corrective action the first time.
The Projected Path of VUFLOW to Market
The degree to which VUFLOW will be able to help surgeons assess and make data-driven decisions will be explored in 2022 during scheduled First-In-Human studies at major hospitals and related journal publications. Surgeons will explore measuring blood flow speeds simultaneously across the bypass graft, its connection to the coronary, the coronary artery itself, and the surrounding heart tissue. Once these studies are completed, the company envisions a rapid introduction of VUFLOW into the market.
The regulatory push to reduce readmissions is driving adoption of data-driven practices to identify and predict clinical problems and address them the first time. Scinovia aims for VUFLOW to become an everyday appliance in the OR to facilitate this adoption.
For more information about Scinovia and VUFLOW, please visit their website or contact them at:
Scinovia Corp.
[email protected]
(703) 957-0396
SOURCE: Scinovia