Video Transcription
Davidi Vortman 00:02
David, so good morning. My name is Davidi Vortman, and I'm the CEO of UltraSight. Thanks for being here. If I did a poll, what would you guess kills more women every year? Heart disease or breast cancer? Actually, it's heart disease and by a factor of 10, but it's not just women, it's everyone. Cardiovascular disease is an unsolved problem in health care. You may know it's the number one killer globally, and you may even know it's costing the US economy more than $1 billion a day. What you may not know is, who can we blame? Well, it's this guy, but you don't see his face, right, because there are just not enough of them. And cardiologists agree that the best method to diagnose heart disease is ultrasound. But today, to get an ultrasound specialist, you need to wait between two and three months in the US and in Europe. So we have a problem that is killing people. On the one hand, ultrasound is a low-cost first line of diagnostic device that is loved by cardiologists. On the other hand, we're seeing specialists becoming more and more expensive and harder to find. We just have not enough of them. This was published recently by MGB. Almost half of the US counties have zero cardiologists. That's one of the reasons why only one out of 10 heart disease patients is getting to treatment. The great news is the point of care ultrasound or POCUS is becoming more common in various health care settings due to its low cost and mobility. This is a Philips device called Lumify. The cost is $5,000 very affordable and mobile and great quality, by the way. So why is it so hard to become an expert? So while the POCUS devices held great promise, and they made a leap forward in terms of the hardware, the operator remains the barrier. According to an American College of Cardiology study published a few months ago, the difficulties in acquisition, the long training time which can take up to a year, the fact that it's hard to transmit images, and there is a lot of diagnostic uncertainty that is going on, that is the challenge that is keeping us from making ultrasound scalable and useful. So ultrasound is going to fix that. We slash the need for a specialist with AI guidance; users can perform high-quality scans after just one day. One of our commercial sites, Mayo Clinic, gave our software to three novice users with no background in ultrasound, and within four hours, four hours, they learned how to scan. They scanned 600 patients over six weeks. And I cannot speak definitively about the results, but I can share that the sensitivity and specificity were above 95%. So this continues to prove to us that ultrasound can be performed by any medical professionals that are generalists. We want to take this approach and solve the bottleneck that exists today in the system, allowing anyone to scan patients and really decouple it from the interpretation. And our approach is to simplify the acquisition of images, making it so simple, even your CEO can do that. So let me show you how it works. The system is riding on top of off-the-shelf ultrasound devices. In this case, it's the Lumify device. A nurse can operate that. And what you see on the screen in the middle is the ultrasound image itself that's coming here. On the left side, you see a reference image that gives the user an indication of what they are looking for. You select the apical four-chamber view as your target, and then the AI directs you to 4C. Now you start moving the probe, and you see these instructions are super intuitive. They track your movements, and this is really the only software that can track movements without using any sensor. So we don't have anything on that probe. It's all coming from deep tech that understands the video image and does what your brain does, so translating that image and reverse engineering it and giving you instructions that are very easy to follow. Once you get to green, the quality bar gives you a green. Education, you can save the loop and move to the next patient, and you don't need to wait for an attending or an expert and ask them, "Hey, is this good enough?" And this is how easy it is to use. We're focusing on an amazing user experience. This was FDA cleared last year, CE marked in the UK, and the results were published in Circulation last year. The market opportunity for UltraSight exceeds $4 billion by 2030. The fact we can create high-quality images anywhere really makes it very clear inside acute care; this is where you can save people's lives based on imaging. So our acute care is our beachhead market. Our technology provides immediate diagnosis to treat, to get treatment and monitoring during hospitalization, especially useful in the ED, ICU, or internal medicine. And there is even a bigger market for chronic heart disease patients, where UltraSight enables timely diagnosis and monitoring in a hospital setting or remotely. We have strong validation for this solution within acute care at Christus Health, a system in Texas which just signed a contract with us. They have more than 600 centers. They have long waiting times, very painful. This is delaying care and discharge, and our solution will be deployed across eight departments along the cardiology service line. J&J chose us as their AI imaging partner for Albumed, one of their subsidiaries, and for Albumed, which is the market leader in cardiac support devices, the lack of 24/7 sonographer availability is limiting the market uptake of Impella, which is the leading product. And we're developing an AI guidance solution specifically for Impella. This will allow any ICU staff member, like a nurse or a PA, to perform the cardiac scan without waiting for a sonographer, even if it's 2 AM at night or it's the weekend. And this will allow getting answers within minutes because you can push that imaging to the physician directly. We are also excited to share that we signed a strategic partnership with Mayo Clinic. We built this real-time guidance software based on unique infrastructure that allows you to run AI efficiently on edge devices. So we're doing everything here on that device without going to the cloud. The same infrastructure is going to be used to take the Mayo set of algorithms and tools that were developed over the last few years and bundle them into a unique experience on-device that will allow a clinician to do the scanning, get the data, get interpretation, all happening in real-time. So this is years of research by Mayo that are going to be bundled into this infrastructure. And Mayo also became an investor in the company, and our vision is to deliver an end-to-end solution that can work on multiple UltraSight devices. We started with Philips Lumify, and we're expanding that to additional devices such as Butterfly and Economist. UltraSight is raising a $20 million round. It's a C round. Proceeds will be used to expand our solution to the US commercially, including the rollout of the partnership with Albumed and J&J and the broader commercialization strategy in the acute care market. The team is built from top AI scientists and tech executives on a mission to revolutionize health care. Thank you so much for your time. We really look forward to partnering with you on this journey. And I invite you to scan this information, and if you want to reach me, I'm here until evening, and you know we are committed to changing cardiac care, and we welcome you to join us in that journey. Thank you very much.
