Randall Whiting Presents Cephasonics Ultrasound Solutions at LSI USA ‘23

Transcription

Randall Whiting  0:05  

Good afternoon. As you mentioned, I'm here to talk about the incredibly exciting new technology called ultrasound. And after the last presentation, I hope you get that was my really lame attempt at humor, because that's really not what we're doing. We are trying to reimagine what ultrasound is and how it's applied to the clinical market and a lot of medical procedures. So a little background on us, started the company in 2012, we were primarily a research company, we were building specialized ultrasound systems that were used by people like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Technical University of Munich, and so on, to push the boundaries of what ultrasound could be used for and how it could work a lot of the physics of it. Well, based on a lot of discussions with some of our partners at universities, like at Stanford, they're saying, you know, you've built a really interesting technology for maybe using this new thing called AI. And this was back around 2015. And we started looking at that went, Well, maybe we do have something here that's special and unique. So we decided to pivot the company in roughly 2017, to become an OEM provider of hardware and software primarily designed to help partners, like hopefully many of you, potentially, to build AI ultrasound applications, and to use those in that type of medical process. So I don't have a clicker. Oh, this is it. Okay, perfect. That always helps, doesn't it? Okay, there we go. So, before I go into kind of what we do, and why we do it really quick, we're not here raising money. We're lucky that we did a an early round. And we were able to continue on that we've been able to be at breakeven now for a couple of years. But we're here talking to partners, we're actually talking to a lot of people who are building medical products that might need the measurement capability that we can do with ultrasound. So we're looking at opportunities to partner insulin in the market. So the need that we address specifically is to use ultrasound to measure things inside the body, you're not that great image that you so typically see when people talk about ultrasound, being able to generate quantitative data, quantitative numbers to a doctor to be able to provide them information that they need to help them in a particular medical procedure to reduce time, reduce costs, improve overall outcomes. Now, the first question we usually get as well, you know, there's all these wonderful ultrasound systems out there, you know, our big brothers out there, GE and j&j and Medtronic, and so make great systems that have nothing against them. But the fundamental problem is when we get into measurement, we've realized and we found the commercial ultrasound, the typical ultrasound system just can't support increasingly complex AI applications. And that's where everybody's going. It's, it's this, you know, I create some new way to be able to envision or measure something or determine something in real time inside the body. So our solution is what we say is to move from ultrasound from eyeballs to algorithms. Historically, I mentioned this, it's all about the gray image, you know, fundamentally, a human brain can only discern the differences between something, a relatively small number of gray scale images, with the eyeball and being able to determine a type of meaningful data out of it, an ultrasound probe can generate well into the millions of shades of grey. And typically, historically, the, you know, we do the subjective interpretation of the images from ultrasound, and the data that we can't see, we throw away. And in fact, many systems are designed from a hardware perspective to really eliminate that data. So it's never available. So you have a subjective interpretation of a limited amount of data. We started talking last night at one of the conference sessions, about digital data in healthcare. It's all about data. And that's really kind of the first tenets of what we work on is increasing the amount of data that's available. So we can do objective machine measurement, using algorithms to determine information in that data. And we do this through a couple of very basic things. We have very high performance, specially designed hardware for AI and measurements using ultrasound. We design those products for OEM integration, we build them into other medical products. So your medical products or other companies that are designing things can have that capability to do real time measurement, navigation and so on, provide an open application development toolkit, so you can control all aspects of ultrasound relatively easily. And we also work with a variety of different types of transducers, including wearable ones and integrating those to be able to expand how and where you collect data. Our business model is OEM, we deliver it as platform, we provide services to our partners to help them reduce time to market of their products. And we generate recurring revenue from a couple of different approaches. The traction we've gotten so far, these are some examples of our partners today that are working on specific products or have released these products into the market from bone density positioning for cardiac ablation nerve location, etc. And in fact, let me give you one example. This is a company called tissue differentiation, that tissue differentiation intelligence, not the easiest company name from a marketing perspective. But they're one of three companies that have received 510 K clearance for products that are powered by surface Onyx technology, these guys have created a system that is used during back surgery that in real time tells the surgeon essentially where key nerves are in the back in relationship to the surgery that they're doing. And that means much better outcomes. Because the most common outcome and lower back surgery bad outcome is that you have nerve damage, you tingling, loss of motion, loss of muscle functioning in your legs, this eliminates that. There we go. So currently, we have a number of products that we sell on the market, we're well established. In the market with our customers, we sell board based ultrasound systems that are used to design very customized ultrasound applications. We have modular boxes that are essentially are designed for integration and OEM and for development, we have a complete line of application ready carts there can you just add your software to. And then we're also working with specialized probes, including a partnership with Philips on the design and integration of new CMOS technology for things like wearable ultrasound. So what's next, we're seeing that there's increasingly complex ultrasound applications that people want to do more and more algorithms more and more AI. And that essentially is pushing the performance requirements of all ultrasound systems are out there. And we're also finding that all these applications don't always need the same pieces of hardware. So the idea of an all in one ultrasound system that sits next to your product really doesn't make sense. So we've continued to design new products, we're going to be bringing out a whole series of new products over the next 18 months, that are much more modular, much more high performance that's going to allow us to do scalable custom configurations designed with our partners for their products, be able to provide superior real time processing of all that data to be able to do more types of measurements and and understanding of the tissue that it's looking at. And being able to push the boundaries of what ultrasound can do. Today, it's we have kind of a limited world. Again, it's kind of not very exciting, but the potential of the kinds of things that we can do in the future with much more data is very open ended. Real quickly, we all know the markets really big, the specialty ultrasound application market for Computer Aided procedures, robotics, point of care, diagnostics, and so on. It's about $3 billion. And I won't go through our revenue forecasts, but just in general, because I've only got a few seconds here. Key things as we use ultrasound to measure things in the body platform to power medical devices do real time limited access to data, unlimited access to data, custom engineering, so on So we're here to help you do that. With that. Thank you so much.