Founded in 2018, Abys® Medical is a company that specializes in developing innovative medical devices. Pioneering the concept of Surgery 4.0, Abys® Medical wants to change the game. Arnaud Destainville, President and Co-Founder of Abys® Medical, explaining how metaverse technologies applied to surgery have revolutionized medicine today.
What are the issues and challenges in your sector of activity?
Created the abyss® Medical treatment is based on the following observation: the world’s population is growing and living longer and longer. If the rise in the average life expectancy of the world’s population testifies to the progress of medicine and a better quality of life, it is important to combine this fact with the current acute shortage of surgeons to get an idea of the difficulties that we are going to face and whose effects we are now beginning to suffer.
Strong bug is being generated day by day. In the United States, in 2023, there will be a shortage of about 20,000 to 30,000 surgeons, all specialties combined. Thus, the population and its aging population are growing faster than the number of medical personnel. This crisis has severe consequences for the care patients receive. It breeds medical errors, failure to treat diseases, and overcrowding in hospitals. The annual cost of medical errors that could be avoided if surgeons had the right digital tools to support them is estimated at $36 billion.
These poor conditions prompted two of the founders of Abys to practice medicine® Medical, Arnaud Destainville and Olivier Richart, for thinking about designing innovative digital solutions to address these challenges.
How the abyss® Medical plans to revolutionize the practice of surgery?
To revolutionize the current surgical system, several parameters have been taken into account. The challenge is to get surgeons to embrace the use of metaverse technologies as a new reference in the practice of their profession in order to structure a new workflow that improves the safety, performance and profitability of managing surgical care.
For this, we designed Surgiverse®, the first surgical planning software suite that is accessible via a web browser and can be viewed as 3D images in the operating room. It aims to simplify every stage of the surgery life cycle from its preparation by the surgeon to its performance in the operating room. The basis of this solution is based on the use of cloud computing, which makes it completely interoperable, without investing in IT hardware, unlike, as far as I know, the solutions currently available on the market.
The solution gives surgeons access to two components. First, to the surgical planning platform (Cysware®), accessible via a web browser, allowing them to set up their operational strategies. Then, access an application (Cysart®) allowing visualization of the layout in the form of holograms in the operating room, thanks to the mixed reality technology of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 headset.
Seswari® It is a collaborative platform to create an electronic surgery profile where the digital twin of the limb or organ to be operated on will be designed in 3D, based on medical imaging. In this form, the surgeon will be able to plan his intervention, label the areas at risk, incorporate comments, and save all useful documents in this file in the same file. For his part, Sysart® is an application available on the Microsoft HoloLens 2 mixed reality headset that allows access to the prepared file at any time during the process. This 3D visualization in the form of 3D images is a means of consulting in real time and in a sterile manner, all planned elements.
In short, the solution proposed by Abys® Medical intervention upstream, to prepare for surgery as well as during the intervention to accompany the surgeon. And so, Surgivers® Enhances the surgeon’s work plan and reduces the risks associated with the intervention.
On the other hand, we have made it our mission to increase the operational performance of surgeons, a point we believe is key to combating the global shortage of surgeons in the future. We can confirm that the uptime of interventions implementing our solutions has been significantly reduced by 20 to 50%. This time saving works in favor of a greater number of interventions that can be carried out in the same time allowed.
What are the next steps in your development?
Today, we are actively publishing and commercially distributing our solutions in the market and mainly in the US market thanks to the recent acquisition of Marketing Authorization by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). by Surgiverse®. By 2024, we expect our technology to be installed in at least fifteen US states.
Winner of the i-Nov competition in 2022 and winner of the first French technology promotion Health20 appointed by the government in 2023, we continue our developments in this momentum to obtain the necessary certifications to enter the European market in early 2024.
A word to finish?
Since inception, we are convinced to bring to market a key innovation that will become a ‘game changer’. There will be a before and after Surgiverse®. This patented technology provides the world of healthcare in general, and surgery in particular, with a comprehensive solution that enables us to enter the era of predictive and personalized surgery.
