Activ Surgical | Top Artificial Intelligence Solutions Company 2022
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Activ Surgical
Breaking Down Barriers in Healthcare with AI

Breaking Down Barriers in Healthcare with AI

Todd Usen, Activ Surgical | Healthcare Tech Outlook | Top Artificial Intelligence Solutions CompaniesTodd Usen, CEO, Activ Surgical
Artificial intelligence’s (AI) transformative power is reverberating across many industries, but its impact on healthcare could be more profound and far-reaching than in any other field. A recent study by Frost & Sullivan suggests that using AI and analytics in conventional operating rooms will help hospitals address inefficiencies and clinical challenges physicians face when performing surgery. Having an AI or analytics solution supporting surgeons only enhances their skill set further, which translates to improved patient outcomes, fewer complications and readmissions, and significantly reduced healthcare costs. With telemedicine and remote surgery rising to prominence, AI and data-driven technologies are at the helm of driving innovation within the healthcare realm. Enter Activ Surgical.

With AI at the core, Activ Surgical builds hardware-agnostic surgical software enabling minimally invasive surgical systems (laparoscopes, arthroscopes, and robots) to collaborate with surgeons autonomously. On a mission to enable real-time and best-in-class surgery for everyone, the company has introduced a revolutionary surgical intelligence platform—ActivEdge™— that empowers surgeons to make better-informed decisions, improve patient outcomes, and provide savings to healthcare systems.

Activ Surgical’s first product, ActivSight—a next-gen imaging module—augments any installed visualization system with real-time, intra-operative visual data and images previously invisible to surgeons. “ActivSight can fit into any system, whether a scope or a robot, intra-operatively to deliver key insights to physicians,” says Todd Usen, CEO at Activ Surgical. ActivSight’s overlay technology provides a visual map to the surgical field, making previously invisible functions and critical structures visible to surgeons in a cost-effective and real-time manner. ActivSight is expected to receive its FDA approval and 510(k) clearance at the end of this quarter or early next quarter. The product has already been utilized in 22 successful surgeries in the U.S. and offers multiple benefits to physicians.

ActivInsight, the company’s second product, is an AI and machine learning-based product, which will be designed for continuous improvement and will be underpinned by one of the industry’s largest annotated data sets to be developed by Activ Surgical. As a novel annotation platform, ActivInsight will drastically reduce the time taken for video annotations with an autonomous annotation algorithm, making them nearly 20,000 times faster than traditional surgical video annotation methods.

“There are nearly 216,000 frames in an hour-long surgical video, which are processed at 10 minutes per frame through traditional annotation methods. With ActivInsight’s automated annotation technology, we will be able to annotate an hour-long surgical video in 10 minutes (3 milliseconds per frame),” explains Usen. As such, ActivInsight can transform massive amounts of data gathered intra-operatively to help characterize tissue and critical structures, providing surgeons with augmented visuals and real-time guidance.
With its ActivEdge platform, the company aims to build the world’s first networked surgical platform powered by cloud compute. With the help of ActivSight and ActivInsight, surgeons across the globe can provide insights into multiple procedures in real-time through crowdsourced network data. “The COVID-19 pandemic has redefined the urgency and demand for telehealth and telemedicine, and consequently, expedited the development of the same. Today, a surgeon in the U.S. can assist a physician performing a procedure anywhere in the world through telemedicine or telesurgery. They can guide the physician to identify critical structures, instructing where to cut and where not to cut, what to avoid, what not to avoid, and so forth,” adds Usen.

Activ Surgical has signed a data retrieval and data research contract with one of Asia’s largest healthcare systems, Apollo Hospitals, to annotate surgical datasets. Activ Surgical has also signed agreements with Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. As a member of the “Microsoft for Startups” program, Activ Surgical will have exclusive access to Microsoft’s technologies, including Azure, to optimize the storage model. The company is also working with Nvidia to optimize its inference models and Qualcomm for the immediate use of 5G integration and GPU accelerators. Usen notes, “The new contracts have come at an opportune moment for us as we have opened our European headquarters with a full European advisory board comprising world renowned physicians. We are also expecting to receive the CE certification for our products around July this year,” says Usen.

  • With Activinsight’s Automated Annotation Technology, We Will Be Able To Annotate An Hour-Long Surgical Video In 10 Minutes (3 Milliseconds Per Frame


With 100+ years of med-tech experience, Activ Surgical’s team is deeply committed to medical innovation. As AI continues to expand its reach in the healthcare sector, Activ Surgical is developing its platforms and products to provide physicians with insights and crowdsourced detail intra-operatively in real-time. “The future is data dependent, and we want to be recognized as a revolutionary company that delivers unprecedented insights to improve outcomes in the field of medicine,” remarks Usen.

Top 10 Artificial Intelligence Solutions Companies - 2022

Company
Activ Surgical

Management
Todd Usen, CEO, Activ Surgical

Description
Activ Surgical is a pioneering digital surgery imaging startup that is developing groundbreaking intraoperative surgical intelligence hardware and software. It is building hardware-agnostic surgical software that allows minimally invasive surgical systems (laparoscopes, arthroscopes and robots) to autonomously collaborate with surgeons which will enable surgeons in the operating room to view critical physiological structures and functions, like blood flow, that cannot be seen with the naked eye. The platform will act as the “brain,” enabling applications that have the potential to mitigate surgical error, enhance patient outcomes, and dramatically improve savings to healthcare systems

Activ Surgical News

Activ Surgical Announces Completion of First International Procedure Using Its ActivSight™ Intelligent Light

Foregut Surgeon, who trained at the Esophageal Institute - West Penn Hospital in Pennsylvania, uses Activ Surgical’s proprietary technology during surgical procedure at Abdali Hospital in Amman, Jordan
BOSTON---Activ Surgical, a trailblazer in digital surgery, has announced the successful completion of its inaugural international surgery at Abdali Hospital in Amman, Jordan. This achievement took place using ActivSight™ Intelligent Light (ActivSight), designed to offer enhanced visualization and real-time, on-demand surgical insights in the operating room. ActivSight is a user-friendly module that seamlessly attaches to contemporary laparoscopic and robotic systems, integrating with standard monitors. On December 24, 2023, Dr. Mohamad Rassoul Abu-Nuwar, specializing in general and advanced laparoscopic gastrointestinal surgery, foregut, and bariatric surgery, conducted a surgical bariatric revision procedure utilizing the ActivPerfusion™ Mode within ActivSight.
Dr. Abu-Nuwar, who completed a fellowship in Minimally Invasive Foregut Surgery at the AHN Esophageal Institute in Pittsburgh, received training with Drs. Blair Jobe and Kirsten Newhams on utilizing ActivSight in esophagectomies for cancer patients. During this program, Dr. Abu-Nuwar actively participated in a clinical study showcasing that ActivSight’s Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging (LSCI) provides real-time, repeatable, and on-demand perfusion assessment without the need for dyes, contributing to the prevention of esophageal anastomotic leaks. Ahmad Abu Ghazaleh, Executive Vice Chairman of Abdali Hospital, emphasized the hospital's commitment to patient-centered excellence, stating, "The use of ActivSight by Dr. Abu-Nuwar in surgery demonstrates our dedication to healthcare innovation and pioneering technology in the Middle East."
“West Penn was among the first hospitals where we launched ActivSight in 2022,” said Manisha Shah-Bugaj, Chief Executive Officer at Activ Surgical. “Now, with Dr. Abu-Nuwar championing our technology at Abdali Hospital and the support of one of our lead investors, Hikma Ventures (the strategic venture capital arm of Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC), we are able to deliver intelligent information to doctors beyond the U.S. to reduce surgical complication rates. As we continue to achieve significant milestones such as this, our vision is to transform the collective surgical experience by leveraging emerging technologies and data into insights that make cutting-edge surgery accessible for all.”
Hikma Ventures led Activ Surgical’s Series B extension round in March 2022 and has made 20 investments to date in global digital health companies. Commenting on this milestone partnership, Lana Ghanem, Managing Director at Hikma Ventures, said, “This is the latest example of Hikma Ventures' commitment to supporting pioneering companies utilizing cutting-edge technologies to meaningfully improve patients' lives and treatment journeys and solidifies Hikma’s role in introducing new tools and solutions to patients and hospitals in the MENA region.”
Activ Surgical is transforming the operating room today through its 510(k)-cleared and CE-marked ActivSight device that seamlessly upgrades existing operating room equipment while serving as the “eyes” of their cutting-edge platform. With ActivSight, surgeons can now access critical intraoperative visual data as augmented reality overlays. To date, multiple major hospital networks across the U.S. have purchased ActivSight, and many additional customer sites are planned for 2024.