Israel-founded Theator to work with Mayo Clinic to bring AI to surgical rooms
Startup will collaborate with the clinic’s urology and gynecology departments to test out its annotation and video analytics technology, aiming to improve surgeons’ performance
Shoshanna Solomon was The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter
Theator, an Israeli-founded, Palo Alto, California-based startup that aims to bring artificial intelligence and computer vision technologies to surgical rooms, has set up a collaboration with Mayo Clinic in the US.
The partnership will allow Theator to work with the clinic’s urology and gynecology departments and test out its annotation and video analytics technology to improve the surgeons’ pre-operative preparation and post-operative analysis and debriefing, in order to give surgeons a chance to improve their performance.
Using computer vision, software developed by the firm scans video footage of real-time procedures and their key moments. This allows surgeons to watch video recordings of procedures — broken down into their various steps — and fast forward or rewind to steps they wish to learn. Users can also get digital summaries of their own surgical performance, with analytics, graphics and rankings, allowing them to pinpoint additional training and skills that might be needed.
The strategic collaboration follows Mayo Clinic’s investment in Theator’s $15.5 million Series A funding round earlier this year.
Theator was co-founded in 2018 by Dotan Asselman and Tamir Wolf, and has an R&D center in Israel.
The collaboration with Mayo Clinic will enable the firm to access “a rich array of insights from world-class urology and gynecology departments, with the goal of broadening our experience in order to tackle the pressing problems of disparity and variability in surgical care today,” said Dr. Tamir Wolf, CEO and co-founder of Theator.
The strategic collaboration “will deepen our visual and contextual understanding of surgical best practices and enable us to refine and develop our preoperative preparation and postoperative debrief Surgical Intelligence platform, helping surgeons around the world upskill and raise the standards of care for even more patients,” he added.
