Avatar Medical Raises €1.2 Million To Equip Surgeons And Radiologists With Virtual Reality In France And The United States
Avatar Medical, a spin-off of Institut Pasteur and Institut Curie, has raised €1.2 million ($1.4 million) in pre-seed funding from investors including the Institut Pasteur to radically change the way surgeons access, interpret, and act upon the valuable clinical information contained in medical images.
Founded in July 2020 by a team of French scientists and Franco-American entrepreneurs, Avatar Medical’s technology is based on four years of research in human-data interaction and machine learning conducted at the Institut Pasteur and Institut Curie by Jean-Baptiste Masson, Mohamed El Beheiry, and the late Maxime Dahan.
Avatar Medical is particularly useful for understanding complex morphologies and promises to help avoid mastectomies, shorten operating times on aneurysms and inform operating decisions on complex fractures. The key to these benefits is the instant creation of detailed virtual reality-compatible 3D patient representations, or “avatars”, based solely on existing medical images provided by Avatar Medical’s technology. Advanced “smart” filters preserve the completeness of the imaging data used in the avatars, ensuring reliable and unbiased representations, unlike those observed in common segmentation approaches.
“Our mission is to unlock the power of medical images and make them actionable to surgeons, students but also patients,” says Xavier Wartelle, CEO of Avatar Medical. “We have an outstanding team of surgeons and radiologists working hand-in-hand with us. Some of them are now shareholders and that speaks for itself, ” he added.
“I was blown away by the fluidity of the interactions I could have with 3D representations of medical images through virtual reality. It’s a real game-changer because I can now see a complete knee in the blink of an eye to prepare my surgeries or explain them to my patients, ” said Dr. Greg Sarin, an orthopedic surgeon in Colorado and investor in Avatar Medical.
“Avatar Medical is one of the first startups to benefit from the support of our Pasteur Innovation Accelerator. The objective of this program is to accelerate the marketing of innovative products resulting from laboratory discoveries. Avatar Medical is a good example of what excellent academic research can produce as a solution with a direct benefit for patients. We are delighted to continue our investment through our participation in the fundraising,” said Isabelle Buckle, Director of Research Applications and Industrial Relations at the Institut Pasteur.
Avatar Medical is an innovative spin-off from Institut Pasteur and Institut Curie. Avatar Medical was incorporated in Paris in July 2020 by an experienced team of French and American founders, and also operates in the United States. The company has been selected in prestigious competitions and programs: i-Lab, the MedFIT award for the most innovative European startup, PR[AI]RIE, and NVIDIA Inception. Full commercial deployment of the FDA and CE approved version of the software platform is planned for 2022. [Twitter: @AVATAR_MEDICAL] [LinkedIn] [Vimeo] [Publications]
