Robotics company raises $6M to help fund new vascular imaging platform
Vexev, an Australian medtech company focused on robotic technologies, has raised $6 million from a mix of new and existing investors. The funds are expected to go toward securing U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for the company’s VxWave vascular imaging platform and then commercializing that technology throughout the United States.
Vexev has now raised a total of $19 million to date.
VxWave is a robotic tomographic ultrasound platform designed to improve patient access to high-quality medical imaging. It uses a mix of robotics, ultrasound and artificial intelligence to fully automate the image acquisition process. The company is starting off with a focus on vascular access in dialysis patients, but it plans on expanding its reach quickly to cover other applications such as cardiovascular disease and peripheral artery disease.
Early data on the technology found it was associate with a scanning success rate of 94% for autonomous vascular imaging performed by a nonspecialist clinician.
“We believe high-quality vascular imaging should be available wherever patients receive care, not only when a specialist is available,” John Carroll, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Vexev, said in a prepared statement. “We are starting with dialysis patients because the clinical need is clear, but our vision is much broader: to build an autonomous imaging platform that helps clinicians make faster, more consistent and more informed decisions across vascular disease.”
“Having worked closely with Vexev for several years, I have seen the development of its impressive robot- and AI-based techniques for vascular imaging,” Anupam Agarwal, MD, senior vice president for medicine and dean of the Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “The company's initial focus on dialysis vascular access addresses an important challenge for patients and providers, and I believe this technology has the potential to bring meaningful innovation to dialysis patients with vascular access challenges.”
Michael has more than 19 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.