“We are excited to have Chris join our team as XACT Robotics continues to grow and expand our presence in healthcare systems across the U.S., Europe and Israel. Chris’ experience working in different healthcare sectors in the medtech industry, and his many years of sales and business development experience, will be invaluable as we accelerate our commercial launch. He will lead engagement with prominent hospitals and radiology programs around the world regarding the physician and patient benefits of our XACT ACE™ Robotic System and the value of an interventional radiology robotics program.”

Mr. Horton has nearly 30 years of experience in the medical device industry, including a broad range of commercial responsibilities with both start-up and global organizations. Prior to joining XACT Robotics, Chris served as Regional Vice President of Sales with Merit Medical where he managed a direct sales team, clinical associates, and distributor partners across 23 states. Prior to that, Chris worked in leadership roles with other leading medical technology and healthcare companies including Monteris Medical, Invuity, Applied Medical, Endocare, Kyphon, Cyberonics and U.S. Surgical. Mr. Horton said:

“Leveraging my experience in interventional radiology, I look forward to working with the entire team at XACT Robotics to bring the XACT ACE™ Robotic System to healthcare settings as the only solution to potentially support earlier diagnosis and treatment for patients, lower the risk of complications from surgery and lead to shorter recovery times. I am excited to work with such a disruptive technology that can help change patients’ lives as well as support a more efficient use of radiology services and resources.”

Chris also has clinical experience working in a variety of areas including interventional radiology, urology, cardiology, neurology, endocrinology and oncology. This experience brings a unique combination of direct sales management, clinical engagement, cross-functional leadership, business development, healthcare economics and product and market development.

Published today, the paper studied the progression of lung opacities in chest CT images of COVID patients and extracted insights about the temporal relationships between CT features and lab measurements. A better understanding of the progression of lung opacities in COVID patients could help inform clinical decisions in patients with pneumonia and yield insights during clinical trials for therapies to treat the virus.

Тhe researchers used an NVIDIA Clara AI segmentation model to automate the time-consuming task of segmenting the total lung in each CT scan. Expert radiologists reviewed the total lung segmentation and manually segmented the lung opacities.

To track the progression of the disease, the researchers used generalized temporal curves, which correlated the CT imaging data with lab measurements. Then they used 3D visualizations to reconstruct the evolution of COVID opacities in one of the patients.

Photo Credits: NVIDIA Developer, News Center

What they found was that lung opacities appeared between one and five days before symptom onset, and peaked a day after symptoms began. They also analyzed two opacity subtypes — ground-glass opacity and consolidation — the ground glass opacities appeared earlier in the disease and persisted for a time after the resolution of the consolidation.

In the paper, the researchers showed how CT dynamic curves could be used as a clinical reference tool for mild COVID-19 cases and might help spot cases that grow more severe over time. These curves could also assist clinicians in identifying chronic lung effects.

The deep learning models were developed using the NVIDIA Clara application framework for medical imaging.

Mr Partovi joins Philips from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he served as Worldwide Head of Business Development for Healthcare, Life Sciences and Medical Devices. In that role, he was responsible for the global AWS go-to-market strategy, charting the path for customer cloud transformation, and the adoption of AI and machine learning.

Prior to joining AWS, Mr Partovi spent 20 years at Dignity Health, the fifth-largest health system in the U.S. He started his career in 1998 as a neuroradiologist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and was in clinical practice until 2013. In addition to his medical training at McGill University in Montreal, he has post-graduate qualifications in computer science. Mr Partovi has a passion for learning and teaching. He helped launch the Biomedical Informatics Department at Arizona State University and taught there as a clinical professor for three years.

Mr Tas, who joined Philips in 2011 as Chief Information Officer and became Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer. He has made a personal decision to assume a part-time position in Philips focused on continuation of the company’s strategic business development until the end of 2022.

The CEO of Royal Philips, Mr Frans van Houten said:

“On behalf of Philips’ Executive Committee, I am very pleased to welcome Shez Partovi as our new Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer. Shez brings deep healthcare and informatics experience to Philips, which will be highly relevant as we accelerate the transition to becoming a solutions leader, leveraging deep clinical insights and big data analytics.”

Philips also today announced that Rob Cascella, currently Strategic Business Development Leader and formerly in charge of Philips’ Diagnosis & Treatment segment, will step down from the Executive Committee as planned. Mr Cascella has agreed to act as a special advisor to Philips’ strategic business development projects on a part-time basis.

“We’re expanding and diversifying our digital surgery portfolio with robotics across all indications”

The first-of-its-kind, Loop-X works seamlessly with the full Brainlab digital surgery portfolio or with a customer’s existing surgical setup. Independently moving imaging source and detector panels enable flexible patient positioning and non-isocentric imaging which reduces the amount of radiation exposure and increases the variety of indications that can be treated. This mobile imaging robot can be controlled wirelessly with a touchscreen tablet.

Loop-X was developed in close collaboration between Brainlab and medPhoton in Salzburg, Austria, where the first Loop-X was installed. Hospital San Juan de Dios León in Spain recently performed the world’s first navigated spine surgery using Loop-X mobile imaging robot technology.

Photo credits: BrainLab

Following on the success and growing install base for Cirq, a universal platform for robotic tasks, the new Cirq Robotic Alignment module is capable of fine-tuning the alignment to a pre-planned trajectory and freeing up surgeons’ hands, enabling them to focus on the patient’s anatomy. The President of Brainlab, Sean Clark said:

“Our customers want to offer their patients advanced technologies close to home. Brainlab technologies are designed to enable greater freedom for clinicians and enhance outcomes for patients.”

The recent availability of these robotic medical devices is bringing a futuristic vision of the modern digital operating room closer to reality supporting surgeons in their day-to-day work and bringing benefits to their patients.

Brainlab is a digital medical technology pioneer founded in 1989 and headquartered in Munich. The company creates software-driven medical solutions.

This tool is believed to be able to determine whether an uninfected person who later catches the virus will die from the disease with up to 90% certainty. It also claims to predict whether someone who’s admitted to hospital with COVID-19 will need a respirator with 80% accuracy.

It can also help identify who to prioritize for vaccines and how many respirators a hospital will need. Professor Mads Nielsen from University of Copenhagen added:

“We are working towards a goal that we should be able to predict the need for respirators five days ahead by giving the computer access to health data on all COVID positives in the region. The computer will never be able to replace a doctor’s assessment, but it can help doctors and hospitals see many COVID-19 infected patients at once and set ongoing priorities.”

The study showed that the most decisive indicators were unsurprisingly BMI and age. Males and people with high blood pressure or neurological disease also have an elevated risk. The other most influential factors were having chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. Professor Nielsen also added:

“For those affected by one or more of these parameters, we have found that it may make sense to move them up in the vaccine queue, to avoid any risk of them becoming infected and eventually ending up on a respirator.”

You can check the whole study journal from Scientific Reports. 

A unique video reveals lung gamage in a coronavirus patient admitted in The George Washington University Hospital on March 18, 2020.

GW Hospital was the first in the US to use Surgical Theater© virtual reality technology for lung patients. VR is now being used to assess patients with advanced COVID-19.

Yellow areas are infected and inflamed

Dr. Keith Mortman, Chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at GW Hospital, explains on the latest episode of GW Hospital Healthcast to show to the audience a never before seen look into what COVID-19 can do to a patient’s lungs.

A video shows the lungs of a man who had been asymptomatic a few days earlier.

Now, the patient has Covid-19 and his lungs are failing to function properly, said Dr. Keith Mortman. The Washington, D.C., hospital recently released a 3D video of the coronavirus patient’s lungs.

The George Washington University Hospital received its first COVID-19-positive patient on March 18, 2020. The man, in his late 50s, was transferred from another hospital after his initial symptoms (fever, cough, shortness of breath) quickly escalated. He was connected to a ventilator at that hospital, but eventually required a more-intensive intervention.

“What we’re seeing is that there was rapid and progressive damage to the lungs so that he needed higher levels of support from that ventilator and it got to the point where he needed maximal support from the ventilator,” said Dr. Keith Mortman, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at GW Hospital, in an interview for the hospital’s podcast, HealthCast. “That was when the outside hospital reached out to our expert team here at GW and the patient was transferred to us for something called ECMO, which stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.”

ECMO, which involves removing blood from the body, infusing it with oxygen and returning it to the body, is one of several advanced technologies being used as GW Hospital treats its first patient with COVID-19.

Virtual Reality (VR) Technology

GW Hospital is using Virtual Reality (VR) technology in the fight against COVID-19. VR technology enables the medical team to see into the patient’s lungs. What they have seen has been concerning.

“There is such a stark contrast between the virus-infected abnormal lung and the more healthy, adjacent lung tissue,” said Dr. Mortman. “And it’s such a contrast that you do not need an MD after your name to understand these images. This is something the general public can take a look at and really start to comprehend how severe the amount of damage this is causing the lung tissue. The damage we’re seeing is not isolated to any one part of the lung. This is severe damage to both lungs diffusely.”

Dr. Mortman is especially concerned with the possibility of enduring damage to the lungs of those who survive COVID-19. “When that inflammation does not subside with time, then it becomes essentially scarring in the lungs, creating long-term damage,” he said. “It could impact somebody’s ability to breathe in the long term.”

Mortman said that about 20 percent of those who contract COVID-19 develop symptoms and a portion of those develop severe symptoms that ultimately require mechanical assistance to breathe. While media reports suggest that the risk of severe symptoms is most prevalent among older adults, Dr.​ Mortman points out that younger people are at risk too, as increasing numbers of them are being hospitalized. And even those who never develop symptoms can pass the virus to others they come in contact with, including neighbors, parents and grandparents.

“It is affecting every age group and every country, all 50 states in the U.S., so this is nationwide, a global, a community problem,” he said.