Theator gets $39.5M Series A Funding to Analyze Surgery Videos
A startup called Theator has been applying the process of analyzing and drawing insights from moving images to the world of healthcare. It’s using AI to “read” video captured during operations, to look for best practices but also to help identify key moments when an operation may have taken the wrong turn.
The opportunity in the market that Theator is tackling is this: In the world of surgery, there is a huge trove of video already being created, specifically by way of the camera probes that are used in non-invasive procedures. The main purpose for most of this video is for surgeons to be able to track what they are doing in real time.
Theator’s premise is that, tapped in an effective way, this video could be an invaluable resource to those doctors, the care providing establishments where they work, and potentially to the fields in which they’re working (that is, the wider network of other physicians working in the same areas as they are), if it could be examined and compared against similar procedures carried out elsewhere, and then matched up against outcomes. Theator’s library now has amassed 30,000 hours of anonymized video, with almost 1 billion analyzed frames.
With its Series A funding of $39.5 million and total funding to date of $42.5 million, how both the medical world is adapting and adopting advances in AI to improve its own work; and how investors are stepping up to bet on the opportunity ahead.
Dr Tamir Wolf, the CEO and co-founder of Theator, recalled how both his wife and a friend/colleague coincidentally had the same operation at the same time, but at different hospitals. Both technically went okay, but one had a much bigger after-effects longer term than the other. A lot of people tend to focus on after-care and the complications that can arise there after what has been deemed a “successful” procedure otherwise, but Dr Wolf contends that this is a common misconception, born in part out of the fact that there hasn’t been enough data and insight into the operation itself.
Wolf’s founding of Theator actually came out of that very question, which he asked of himself as a doctor, but also as a friend and family member to patients.
0 Comments