Video Transcription
Georgi Kadrev 00:00
Joe, hello everybody, thank you for being here. I want to start with a very bad statistic. More than 71% of US patients with critical lymphocyticemia got amputations without ever getting any vascular intervention. I'm Georgi Kadrev from Kelvin Health, and our mission is to make preventable deaths and suffering from conditions like lymphocyticemia a thing of the past by applying our solution based on thermography and AI for very accessible vascular diagnostics. We started the team four years ago with very diverse experience in machine learning, AI, medical science, and venture building, and our efforts to build something very accessible for vascular diagnostics have already been recognized by organizations like Novartis, Roche, and IT Health. So Kelvin Health actually started as a spin-off from Imaga, one of the pioneers in visual image recognition. More than 12 years ago, we processed more than 30 billion images for hundreds of enterprise customers across the world, and we've been recognized as an innovator by IDC, by the European Commission, and received a solid amount of grant funding. But Kelvin Health appeared as a very personal venture to us, as it happened as a set of serendipities around the health of ourselves and our loved ones. In 2018, in the summer, shortly before my son was born, my father-in-law, Hugh, nearly lost both of his legs because of late diagnosed peripheral arterial disease as a result of his diabetes, and unfortunately, he is one of the more than 200 million patients who got to the vascular specialist so late that more than 20 million, which is above the average population of a whole European country or a state like Florida, develop critical lymphocyticemia. This is a condition that first takes your limb, then is still very likely to kill you in less than five years. We believe that this problem is rooted in multiple factors, and one of them is the lack of vascular specialists. The other is the lack of accessible and precise, non-invasive diagnostic methods, and in general, the availability of invasive and expensive methods like X-ray and angiography. So we started thinking, can we build a solution that assists in the rapid triage process, in the clinical decision-making process of the specialist, and at the same time is cost and time-saving, and ultimately, limb and life-saving for the patients? So we decided to combine our experience in visual AI and build a very patient-friendly diagnostic solution where, basically using a portable thermal camera like this one, we can capture the heat of the body, segment the different thermal zones, detect local blood flow anomalies, and notify whoever is the examining specialist or clinician. This is different from other modalities of imaging and AI because it's very portable, and also there are no pre-existing data sets from a competitive standpoint. Last but not least, there are no predicate devices currently on the market with the FDA, for example. So the whole concept of mobile thermography and AI is possible because our local body temperature is directly related to our blood flow, and there is a limited amount of factors that can affect it, such as inflammation and blockage. If we can collect enough samples and train machine learning models, we can achieve a very precise diagnostic process, actually in multiple therapeutic areas. However, we decided to focus on vascular conditions first, and here is how the solution works for scanning your legs, then detecting the different arterial zones and the level of perfusion problems in each arterial zone. This is how our software automatically segments the images and detects the perfusion problem in each of those zones. And these are real screenshots from our software. So together with the medical team of Professor Evil Petrov, we repeated this experiment more than 11,000 times, obtained more than 11,000 thermograms from 1,500 patients, and we witnessed very high precision, both in terms of detecting the problem and its locality that can be matched with the very invasive X-ray and angiography. So we started working with multiple other specialists and providers across the world, and we witnessed a lot of excitement about Kelvin Health's impact, even during its current research phase. Nine months ago, we also started conducting interviews with US clinicians, and something that we spotted as a very interesting occurrence was that they see the application of this, not just in specialty vascular care, but also in primary care and podiatry in emergency response cases, where the time for diagnostics is of very strong importance. So currently at the pre-clinical stage, we are practically repeating our feasibility studies from Europe in the US, engaging with multiple partners, and after we get FDA clearance, we want to start by offering this as an assistive diagnostic solution in the hands of the specialist on the vascular care team. But then we also want to expand to primary care, basically as a specialist-agnostic or user-agnostic tool that can empower wide screening. And last but not least, we also want to empower the patients to have the benefit of precise, rapid, remote monitoring in the comfort of their homes when this is needed, even assuming that we use this solution just in the hands of the specialist and just for the therapeutic area of vascular disease. And peripheral arterial disease and critical limb ischemia in particular gives us more than 800 million of serviceable addressable market, if we assume $550 per examination session diagnostic as a service business model. So what's current for us, as I briefly said, is repeating the feasibility studies that we did in Europe in the US, then preparing for FDA breakthrough designation and the novel or PMA applications, grant funding some of our research so we can reduce and mitigate the risk for investors, and ultimately starting a preemptive EHR integration and talking with payers so we can scale the solution further once it's validated. To speed up this process, we are currently raising 4.8 million US dollars. More than 1/3 of it has actually been already soft committed from various investors in Europe, and we are working with multiple acceleration programs, some of them completed, some of them ongoing, currently here in Europe. So if you also believe that a true unicorn company should positively affect the lives of a billion people, we are happy to discuss how we can do this together. And one interesting opportunity there are representatives from healthcare providers here is that we're currently applying for P-Query funding by the end of this month, with a budget of 22 million for feasibility and then clinical validation phase. Thank you. Thank you very much.
