INOVAIT Selects Luxsonic Virtual Image-Guided-Therapy Project for Focus Fund
Pan-Canadian partnership is developing a virtual reality (VR) platform, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), to improve medical imaging and image-guided therapy (IGT).
Luxsonic Technologies Inc is proud to announce they are leading a three-million-dollar project selected from the inaugural Focus Fund call for applications.
Tens of thousands of image-guided-therapy (IGT) procedures are performed in Canada every year, treating everything from cancer to heart disease. INOVAIT and the Government of Canada announced a major investment in IGT. The INOVAIT Focus Fund supports one-third of the cost of three-year projects at the intersection of advanced imaging, minimally invasive surgery, and artificial intelligence. The resulting technologies have the potential to greatly improve patient outcomes and reduce the overall cost of healthcare in Canada.
This project is a pan-Canadian effort to improve the efficiency and speed of IGT workflow. “In some cases, it can take over a week to process patient specific medical imaging data into a form that doctors can use to help them prepare for a surgery or therapeutic intervention,” said Dr. Mike Wesolowski (PhD) the CEO of Luxsonic. He added, “This data processing and visualization normally requires several expensive software applications and can often slows down patient care.” Building on top of their ground breaking virtual reality medical imaging platform, sieVRt, Luxsonic is working with partners across Canada to improve this workflow.
Luxsonic is partnering with Voronoi Health Analytics, Drs., Joel Finkelstein (MD, MSc, FRCS(C)) and Michael Hardisty (PhD) from Sunnybrook Research Institute, and Prof. Karteek Popuri’s (PhD) research group at Memorial University of Newfoundland, to create a unified set of tools, accessible in virtual reality and powered by artificial intelligence, to speed up IGT workflow. This Focus Fund project is a continuation of Luxsonic’s successful sieVRt MLHub Pilot Project which was funded by INOVAIT in 2022.
“With support from INOVAIT and the Government of Canada, our group is building a transformative application that will speed up workflow for physicians and improve their ability to visualize and interact with complex medical imaging data,” said Dr. Wesolowski, “This will translate into improved efficiency, lower costs, and ultimately better patient care.”
INOVAIT’s Focus Fund contributions will help Luxsonic and its partners develop the software platform, attract private investment, and create jobs. This project will help transform Canada’s image-guided therapy sector and once complete will help patients in Canada and around the world. “This is an ambitious project that brings together companies and researchers from across Canada. It wouldn’t be possible without our collaborators and funding from INOVAIT,” summarizes Dr. Wesolowski.
About Luxsonic
Luxsonic’s mission is to improve access to healthcare for billions of people around the world, using immersive technology like virtual reality. They empower the healthcare industry with immersive software tools that enhance medical education, clinical training, and remote healthcare delivery. They have been pioneering immersive healthcare since 2017 and have deployed their software at innovative medical organisations across North America, with a growing presence around the world.
For more information on Luxsonic and their VR radiology suite, SieVRt, please visit https://luxsonic.ca or https://sievrt.com.
About Sunnybrook Research Institute
Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI) is the research arm of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, an internationally recognized academic health sciences centre fully affiliated with the University of Toronto. With well-established programs in basic and applied sciences which span across three scientific platforms and ten clinical programs, SRI is developing innovations in care for the more than 1.3 million patients the hospital cares for annually. Recognized as a Centre of Excellence in focused ultrasound, SRI has one of the most comprehensive and successful focused ultrasound research programs in the world, with technical, scientific and clinical experts accelerating progress in the field.
For more information on Sunnybrook Research Institute, please visit https://sunnybrook.ca/research/.
About Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN)
Memorial University, founded in 1925 in Newfoundland, is focused on extraordinary teaching and learning, outstanding research and scholarship, and public engagement. As one of the top 20 research universities in Canada, Memorial has more than 30 research centers and receives more than $100 million in research funding annually, with greater than $40 million of this funding coming from industry. Memorial and its funding partners have long believed in investing in talented students, which has resulted in more than 1,500 graduate fellowships and approximately 900 PhD students.
For more information on MUN, please visit https://www.mun.ca/.
About INOVAIT
Established in 2020, INOVAIT invests strategically in collaborative partnerships that build upon Canada’s strength in digital innovation and health science research to create a critical mass of world leading Image-Guided Therapy (IGT) companies. Led by the Sunnybrook Research Institute and supported by the Government of Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund, the network brings together small, medium-sized, and large companies, research organizations, post-secondary institutions, and not-for-profit organizations. Its objective is to build a truly integrated IGT ecosystem by fuelling continuous innovation that revolutionizes healthcare globally.
For more information on INOVAIT, please visit https://inovait.ca/.
