A Cleveland Clinic spinout will give surgeons a “GPS-like” tool to navigate a patient’s insides while they’re on the operating table, so as to improve the efficacy and safeness of a surgical procedure. The startup, called Centerline Biomedical, will reduce radiation exposure, to boot.
Endovascular surgeons, for instance, traditionally use X-ray technology to guide their instruments and devices into position, the Cleveland Clinic says. This takes several hours, which exposes the patient – and the health workers – to a lot of potentially harmful radiation. X-rays also only give a two dimensional view of a patient’s insides – which makes navigation and positioning tough in a three-dimensional scenario.
“The concept came out of pure necessity,” Matthew Eagleton, a physician Cleveland Clinic’s Heart & Vascular Institute, said in a statement. “The combination of unsafe radiation levels, lengthy procedure times, and limited visualization capacity created an urgent opportunity to solve a real problem for hospitals and patients everywhere.”
This is the 71st spinout from Cleveland Clinic, formed by its commercialization arm – Cleveland Clinic Innovations. It has gotten investment dollars from the Ohio BioValidation Fund, which is a state-supported early stage venture fund. William Fuller, the former CEO-in-residence of Cleveland’s BioEnterprise life sciences accelerator, was named Centerline’s CEO.
