Your company has made some amazing advances in 3-D medical imaging. Can you talk specifically about your products and how the company’s software developments help with patient care? We help doctors think and work better in 3-D. One product, Perspecta, is essentially a “crystal ball” that projects hologram-like images into true 3-D. It’s been through several clinical studies for a common type of cancer treatment called external-beam radiation therapy. It does a great job helping doctors optimize their treatment plans.
Another effort is our work on a software system, PerspectaSeed, for prostate cancer treatment. Using a [traditional] display and ultrasound data from the operating room, our engineers are analyzing prostate imagery to train a computer to help doctors better place the 100 radioactive “seeds” used in prostate brachytherapy. This is a big deal. We believe we can radically decrease the side effects of common cancer treatments.
Dossier
Name: Gregg Favalora
Title: Founder and chief technology officer
Organization: Actuality Medical Inc.
Philosophy in a nutshell: “Hire people smarter than you are, and then get out of their way.”
Favorite personality traits: Sincerity, humor and empathy
Most fascinating technology: Biologically inspired emergence
Dream dinner guests: “[Microcircuitry genius] Carver Mead, David Byrne, and my late grandfather, Irving Green, so he could see that his ‘optics gene’ passed on to me.”
Which types of cancer are your products most successful in working with, and why is this technology superior to other types of 3-D imaging software? We believe that there is a lot of opportunity to help improve so-called soft-tissue cancer treatment, such as prostate, breast and liver cancer surgery.
Did you know that about half of all women who get a breast lump removed have to return because it turns out that the surgeon didn’t get it all out the first time? Part of this is a visualization issue. We are inventing technologies to help doctors link their surgical plans to the actual shape of the tumors in the operating room. We hypothesize that this will result in saving hospitals money and that patients [will have] fewer side effects.
The device closely resembles a crystal ball. Is the image live? Can you move it around in real time on the screen while the patient is present? Our Perspecta product is an unusual type of display. The imagery it produces really is volume-filling, so you can walk all the way around it to inspect the 3-D scenes from any angle with your unaided eye. You can manipulate the image, say, to zoom in and out or figure out how one molecule could dock into another. The imagery is formed by projecting 6,000 patterns of light onto a special surface that rotates very rapidly. It took us several years to design the optics and software that makes it all happen. Gigabytes of data flow through the system every second, which, when we introduced it in 2001, was unusual. It is a 100 million-pixel display.
How does current technology limit what you’re able to accomplish? I’m glad you asked that. 2009-era PCs are barely powerful enough to crunch large volumes of 3-D data at interactive rates. We’ve been dealing with this issue by using the PCs’ video cards — GPUs — as inexpensive embedded parallel processors. Thanks to GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce 8800, we can slice and dice ultrasound and CT scan data in real time. However, we can certainly use even more power if it’s provided. Likewise, our holographic video displays will improve as digital light modulators, like the Texas Instruments DLP technology, become faster.
What is the next big leap for medical technology in general? I hope to see major advances in the fields of medical imaging at the molecular level, microscopic endoscopy [enabling “virtual pathology” in the operating room] so that the surgeon knows where to snip, and improvements in electronic medical records. Hospitals are fairly siloed, so that is really challenging.
Also, frankly, I am learning a big lesson about how some hospitals operate, which is that the money-making treatment products are adopted with a higher priority than what’s necessarily best for the patient. I wish that wasn’t so.
What are some of the obstacles you face with running a start-up in such a competitive industry? Fortunately, we are the only company in the world selling volumetric 3-D displays. We face a bigger challenge in our medical device/software work, where we’re up against the global medical players. We maintain an aggressive patent portfolio, hire very bright people and make sure our engineers spend plenty of time watching cases in the OR so we build things our customers will find useful. Right now, we’re trying to crack a 10-year-old problem of detecting metallic seeds in prostate patients, and I feel really good that our contrarian solution will be a winner. We’ll know very soon.
Do you find it challenging to be both a businessman and an optical engineer? Yes, that’s tugged at me for a while. Although I have entrepreneurial DNA, there are times when I prefer to be in the lab or at my notebook doing R&D. Also, young entrepreneurs take an unusual career risk of “leapfrogging” over the traditional apprenticeship path; instead, we manage teams of brilliant people who do things we’ve never personally done.
I do think it’s valuable that seeing the business side informs the engineering effort, and vice versa.
What advice do you have for other aspiring young innovators? I love the feelings of solving engineering problems and achieving big milestones, but for some reason, my brain always ratchets to the next difficulty-goal level before I have a chance to enjoy what we’ve accomplished.
Advice? Talk to real customers, in person, starting as early in the game as possible. Find a great mentor. Get involved in the local start-up scene, being sure to give of your time as well. Patent like crazy. Seek personal referrals to the best people. Take risks, but not with your family’s well-being.
And as my chairman, Rob Ryan [founder of Ascend Communications], taught me when I didn’t think there were enough hours in the day, “Gregg, there are plenty of hours from 5 to 9.”
Interview by Sara Forrest, a freelance photographer and writer in New York (saraforrestphoto@gmail.com)
