Yeshwanth Pulijala Presents Scalpel at LSI Europe '23

Transcription

Yeshwanth Pulijala  0:05  
My name is Yesh. I'm the co founder and CEO of Scalpel. Scalpel, we make surgery safer, smarter and more efficient. We do that by using the best in the AI and applying that to the world in surgery, and specifically to surgical equipment. We have a computer vision platform and enterprise great computer vision platform that can detect every single surgical instrument, implant and processes that goes into the supply chain and into the operating theater. All without any physical tags on them. I'm a clinician by background passionate about maxillofacial surgery, I have attended 10s of 1000s of operating room hours. During my time in operating rooms, I've seen things go right. And sometimes they go wrong. But there is this one incident that blew my socks off. I was working at an NHS hospital trust in the UK. Everything started well. But halfway into the surgery, we realized that the surgeon was holding an implant that is not for the patient on the table. But for the patient in the next room. It happened because of a logistic issue. They moved the patients that morning between the operating room a to operating room B but they forgot to move the implants that led to an EMS. In that particular case the patient was safe. But that's not the case across the world. We have a daily incident where we there is a wrong instrument or a wrong implant or misplaced objects inside operating theaters. These costs hospitals billions of dollars in lost equipment, but they also impact patient safety directly. Do you know on an average, a nurse spends one week a month outside the operating theater searching for the instruments, because it's not an everyday thing that you always have the right tools at the right time. This problem is only getting worse, with more and more patients waiting for to get an operation done with surgical supply chain being broken, and a greater number of people looking for jobs outside healthcare, which means there is a significant shortage of skilled staff members and hospitals that's directly impacting patient safety, but it's also directly impacting operational efficiency. This is the problem this is the heart of the problem we are solving at Scalpel. But let's take a step back. Why does this happen in the first place? Well, let me introduce you to the real world. Here is a preference for example. It's a handwritten note that says I want ABCD equipment that goes into this particular tray. And a surgical instrument tray looks anywhere from here to here. For an untrained human eye. These are all the same type, right? These could be the same scissors, but you talk to a trained technician or a nurse or a scrub nurse, they will directly tell you these are different variations. It requires tremendous amount of time, effort and understanding to pick up every single instrument and its variation. Stryker alone has nearly eight different types of trays that go into the knee implant trace, it's extremely important to get the right kind of instrument for the right type of implant to be placed in the patient. And this is where things get really complicated. Because surgical instruments before they touch the skin of the patient, they go through a huge journey, right from the device distribution site, to the sterile services to your medic medical device representatives. These people are touching the surgical instruments and packing them and checking them before the operation. If anyone is tired in the workflow, if which happens all the time. By the way, if I if anyone is overstressed or overstretched. Now you have an issue that is waiting to unlock a big horror story inside operating theater. This is the problem we are fixing with scalpel, scalpel, we have built an enterprise AI platform, our technology gathers data about various surgical instruments and implants at different points in the surgical supply chain and provide these insights to people outside that area. So by working with a medical device distribution warehouse, we can right away informed that the tray is ready correctly packed as for the preference cards for the surgeon to the surgical team, we do the same for sterile service divisions working in the clean rooms, we can inform the sterile services once the tray is packed. But also if the trays bag appropriately as for the surgeon's preference cards, which means across the supply chain, right from the device distribution to operating theatre to sterile service, you don't make mistakes, you save significant costs, and you have a better turnaround of cases. And this is where we differentiate ourselves from the competitors. Majority of the current technologies have some form of a physical tag on objects. On the other hand, we they are not necessarily integrated each one of them or is a siloed technology that doesn't speak to others in the same language. We built an affordable well integrated with software which is also extendable. Let me explain. A hospital can use our platform to identify instruments and then connect that to the preference cards of surgeons. connect that to the surgery scheduling systems. So now, you can not only ensure that you've got the right instruments, you can even pre plan those instruments that require repair those instruments that need that you would need three days from now, which has never been possible before. Without companies like scalpel, I want to show you a glimpse into the detail that we go in. Let's take one example. This is let's take an example of a Babcock tissue forceps. It's common tissue forceps used in healthcare. We don't necessarily tell you that hey, here is a surgical instrument we tell you that a bag of tissue forceps is a tissue forceps, which is a kind of force app, which is a kind of surgical instrument, we are creating the root system, if you think about it, of every surgical instrument, every variation of surgical instrument, connect that data to how it is used, how it is picked up on which patients it is used. We are creating this digital twin of every physical object. And now we empower future of surgery. And if you ever think of a future where a robot comes in and packs a surgical instrument tray, they have to work with a robust computer vision platform that identifies every single variation of surgical instruments we do that. We also connect this technology to IFU, which has instructions for us and training guides. So we help technicians, scrub nurses and surgeons themselves to pack these instruments in the right way. Here's one example of scalpels usage in sterile service divisions. When a technician unlocks a tray, they all they need to do is scan the tray, place these various instruments in the field of view of the camera, click Scan and wait for the magic to happen. Our system identifies each and every object connects that to the table list connects it to the preference card. And lo you have a complete checklist that is confirmed automatically by an AI system. Remember, we are not doing double check. Because double checks are faulty, we do a double do, which is in addition to the human, we have an AI system independently performing the task. That way we eliminate error and make surgery safer. We know this works because we already validated the system working with various healthcare partners strategists in the space, we also work with hospitals demonstrated the proof of technology because that has to be accurate and robust, but also the value add in terms of improving cost savings, reducing carbon dioxide emissions. This is a pretty important point. Let me give you an example. Do you know on an average an implant tray has 6200 instruments in it and a knee implant replacement surgery has 10 to 12 trays that they open. Only 10% of instruments are actually used in surgery, the remaining they are opened up so they are going back into the sterile Service Division. And there's a lot of waste in our operating theatres. technology like this empowers that working with device companies, we could demonstrate significant cost savings, nearly half a million dollars saved on just one tray type in orthopedics alone. And that is the play that we are working on right now preventing lost instruments reducing miscommunications improving the turnaround time thereby helping everybody else not just device companies but hospitals perform more cases efficiently safely. With our very first product, we are tackling orthopedics as the first area of interest. We are looking at a multi billion dollar market just within orthopaedics, just with the very first product and the very first product and dales our product for checking checkout in sterile services and vendor trays 50% Of all the trays in a hospital or loaned not owned. So that is the market that we are tackling with the specialized instruments going from there into operating theatres unlocking massive multi billion opportunity. Orthopaedics alone, unlock spine, that's a 23 billion market opportunity, cardiovascular, neuro net flow and others, it's a great, I am not going to do the math for you. It's a massive market opportunity there. We found this opportunity. And we've built the necessary ground of technology to address that. We have a multidisciplinary team that not only understands the pain points, but also the necessary know how in actually deploying this technology. We've worked with players from Stanford, to Texas Medical Center, we've gone through the accelerator programs, and we also work with the leaders in health tech space and especially in terms of commercialization. This is where we are really excited about we are passionate, but at the same time we know we cannot solve this problem all by ourselves. We are looking for investors who are willing to join us at this stage. We are currently opening a pre Series A round 50% of the round is already committed. We've got money in the bank. So we are not really dying for money but at the same time we are looking for strategic investors. With this funding. We are unlocking multiple new patents and technology that would scale across the sterile services and vendor space. We are scalpel we are making surgery safer and more efficient. If you're passionate about the use of AI in surgery, talk to me. Thank you very much