Video Transcription
Tomer Ben David 00:02
Music, hello. My name is Tomer Ben David, and I'm the CEO of Vortex Imaging. I am a serial entrepreneur with a passion for solving complicated problems using compute resources. I'm delighted to present our revolutionary technology to you. OK, so you all know this: you have a pain, and you go to your physician to get diagnosed, only that some sort of imaging is required, and then you will be referred to do the imaging outside the office, in some dedicated center or even in a hospital. So you'll need to leave the office, schedule an appointment, wait for days or weeks, travel, get scanned, and go back. This is very frustrating. This is painful and stressful, and typically this is just not good for you, and your diagnosis gets delayed. So the physicians are also not happy with the situation. So why can't you actually be scanned within the office setting? So let's examine the current imaging modalities we have today. We all know the MRI and the CT. These are, of course, amazing modalities. They provide high-quality imaging and standardized imaging, which is so crucial to make diagnostics. However, you know this: these machines are very, very large and very expensive, so they don't fit the in-office setting. You'll ask, OK, so what about ultrasound? Well, ultrasound, not only is it large and expensive, but it requires a lot of expertise to operate, and moreover, it doesn't generate standardized images that are so important. So this has been an ongoing problem and challenge for the industry. Many have tried to figure it out, and one product in particular, a family of products, is the POCUS (point of care ultrasound), which tried to address the problem, saying that any physician would have a small, low-cost, simple device in their pocket. The problem is, it doesn't solve the main challenge, and that is, how do you use it? How do you actually operate it? Moreover, how do you get reimbursed for using it? So this is exactly where we come in. I'm delighted to present our technology in action.
Tomer Ben David 03:38
OK, so what are the key points that we just saw here? We have this simple device, really low-cost and safe, that enables you to perform the acquisition within just three seconds. The generated imagery is then standardized 3D by construction and can be viewed as slices using any standard DICOM tool. Moreover, we fully automate the flow for the physician. This means that we bring annotations and measurements for key organs, and we also help auto-generate the documentation needed for reimbursement. Now you may ask, OK, what is it good for? We've talked with numerous physicians from different domains, and this is just a short list of applications that are very, very well fit for our technology. In Q1 of next year, we will be beginning our clinical trials for our first urology application of detecting kidney stones. You can see here today, even in ex vivo imaging today, on the right, you see Vortex Imaging clearly. You can identify the stone within it, and this is a point of care ultrasound. On the left, it's much more challenging. OK, so how does it work? What's the magic? First of all, we have a proprietary transducer probe that we have developed. It uses standard piezoelectric components, but then it operates with our proprietary algorithms. This is the cool stuff here. These are patented algorithms that utilize full waveform inversion, typically inspired by the geophysics world. Now these algorithms are very much compute-hungry, and this is exactly where our expertise comes in handy. My co-founder, Uri Talal, and I have already built a successful company in a different domain, utilizing GPU compute to solve very complicated problems. But let me take you a little deeper into the technology. How does the core algorithm work? So on the left, we have the real world, where the transducer is located on the patient and sensor data is being collected and stored. Now in the middle, what you're seeing here is a virtual world. In the virtual world, we have our own acoustic simulator running on GPUs on the cloud. The main idea is this simulator iterates over and over again, each time trying to modify the target medium such that the simulated acoustic signals will eventually match those from reality. We do that over and over again, and by the time the sensor data match, we know that the target medium actually represents the real world. I know this is a little bit too much, too fast, and too short. If you wish to hear more, please talk with me. So there's a huge market potential for Vortex Imaging; as many as 130 million medical imaging procedures are done annually in the US, following a referral from an in-office physician. This brings a huge opportunity of $25 billion for Vortex Imaging. Our business model makes sense for all stakeholders. We use a pay-per-use model, and we offer a zero capital expense model; we utilize existing CPT codes for reimbursement. So this makes perfect sense for the patient, as we get diagnosed much faster. The physicians are happy as they can do the clinical assessment on the spot and they can get reimbursed for the procedure, and payers are very happy as we're saving on very expensive imaging costs. So in the past four years, we've been putting a lot of effort into R&D, and now we have met a key pivotal milestone of in vivo images. So we have human images right now, and this is exactly the right opportunity and timing for us to take this and make a product out of it. For that, we are raising our Series A of ten million, and we intend to reach the market in early 2027 with our first clinical application. I want to thank you for attending. If you have any more questions, if you wish to join us on this great journey, I'll be super happy to talk with you. Thank you. Applause.
