💡Illuminant Surgical: Safer surgeries by projecting guidance directly on the patient's skin

💫 Hello! We’re Eldrick and James, the co-founders of Illuminant Surgical.

Illuminant is helping surgeons perform safer and more efficient surgeries by projecting visual guidance directly on the patient’s skin. We can display patient specific anatomy, annotations, and real-time feedback as a surgeon operates.

❌ Modern Surgical Care Needs Modern Tools:

Surgeons use techniques from intuition to live x-rays to figure out where to go in the human body during a surgery. James’s experience in the operating room allowed him to see that clinical intuition, though important, was too often used to justify poor surgical approximations. Guessing and checking comes at the cost of patient health. As health care systems are demanding better outcomes, surgeons are driven to find technologies that can enhance their accuracy and increase their situational awareness to better serve their patients.

💡 We’re Building for The Future of Surgery:

One of the many features of our first product allows surgeons to visualize deep internal anatomy taken from the patient’s medical imaging (e.g. CT, MRI) and surgical tool trajectories directly on the patient’s skin, which opens up a new class of minimally invasive techniques in spine surgery.

Most importantly, our new class of surgical navigation systems addresses three critical needs:

1. Clinical Need: We aim to raise the standard of care and decrease patient complications by giving surgeons important information within their line of sight during critical moments in surgery.
2. Market Need: The Illuminant system is cost effective, allowing us to scale beyond high volume care centers and high dollar procedures. Our software-defined approach allows us to support many different types of surgeries. We’re starting with spinal procedures, a $3B+ market with a clear regulatory and reimbursement pathway.
3. User Need: Our system is designed for frictionless use for the care team. It eliminates unnecessary pieces of hardware, is quick and easy to set-up, and is intuitive to use.

🥽 Who We Are:

James and Eldrick were freshman dormmates at Stanford, where they both studied engineering. After school, Eldrick led hardware-software projects and teams as the first employee at a now-Series A lidar startup. James completed biodesign training and went to medical school before leaving in his final year to found Illuminant.

In our early conversations, the same question kept coming up: if we have cars on the cusp of being able to drive themselves, why can’t that technology be used to help surgeons navigate the human body? With our team’s backgrounds in medicine, 3D sensing, computer vision, and hardware development, we realized we could make it happen.

🤲 How You Can Help:

1. Are you interested in piloting our device?  If you are/or know a neurological or orthopedic spine surgeon, reach out to us to pilot our device! We’re offering hands-on demos.
2. Could you introduce us to one health system administrator/decision maker?

Reach out to us at founders@illuminant.ai! We’d love to hear from you.