Episode 253

Bringing Augmented Reality MedTech to Market

Today’s innovative medical technology is more like a video game and makes a minimally invasive ablation so easy it could be done by a 12-year-old.

In this episode of the Global Medical Device Podcast, Jon Speer and Etienne Nichols talk to Mina Fahim, CEO and President of MediView, about bringing augmented reality (AR) medical technology to market.

MediView gives clinicians X-ray vision and leverages AR and artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify, democratize, and inform healthcare delivery. Previously, Mina worked at Medtronic, Abbott, Beckman Coulter, and Excelen.

Mina is a serial entrepreneur in the medtech and fintech spaces. He approaches his life with a foundation of trust, team, transparency, and track record to encourage collaboration and innovation focused on advancing people’s everyday lives.

Some of the highlights of this episode include:

MediView solved the problem of how to place a 3-D representation of a patient’s specific anatomy underneath the skin to millimeter accuracy.
MediView’s solution enables opportunities for digital health care for minimally invasive procedural guidance and data analytics.
MediView’s imaging technology and data feed its platform through a pre-operative or intraoperative scan, such as a CT or MRI, taken of the patient.
The scan is communicated to a headset and an algorithm combines/lines up digital AR and physical coordinates to create a 3-D reconstruction that’s put directly into and onto the patient.
In the U.S., between physical therapy, loss of productivity, and time off, there’s $120-billion of economic impact due to ergonomic injury of medical imaging.
The first therapeutic area and clinical unmet need MediView is targeting is liver and kidney cancer. Only 1 or 2 patients receive a minimally invasive procedure, while the others have to go through chemotherapy or resection.
Mina describes the differences of virtual reality (VR) versus AR. VR puts you in a fully digital world, while AR superimposes digital content onto the physical world.
MediView’s work culture materializes into the company’s business strategy and model across four functions—trust, transparency, team, and track record.

Memorable quotes from Mina Fahim:

“We are hardware agnostic. So, we don’t depend, actually, on any one specific headset because of the unique algorithms that we built in.”

“We have an algorithm that combines the digital world in AR with the physical world.”

“The interventionists are not comfortable taking a needle, sticking it into the abdomen, trying to hit a grape inside of a watermelon blindly to get that tumor ablated.”

“We give clinicians imaging modalities they trust and are comfortable with today to validate the new way we’re providing them to practice and exercise medicine.”

“If a company’s exit strategy is acquisition, having a robust QMS that someone can look at effectively, efficiently, and simply…that has a mental impact, an emotional impact, a burden impact."