Luminate spotlight: Custom Surgical digitizes microscopes for earlier pathology detection
Via the Rochester Business Journal
Custom Surgical, one of 10 startups from around the world working with downtown Rochester’s Luminate accelerator at NextCorps, is helping to write Rochester’s next chapter in history as the world’s center for optics, photonics, and imaging (OPI).
Each company in Luminate’s Cohort 5 receives an initial investment of $100,000 and participates in the six-month program, which helps the selected companies speed the commercialization of their technologies and businesses.
They will compete for up to $2 million in follow-on investment at Finals 2022 on October 19th at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center. Funding for the $25 million program is provided through Empire State Development’s Finger Lakes Forward Upstate Revitalization Initiative.
“We now have more than 50 companies in the Luminate portfolio collectively … working to bring the most innovative OPI applications to a variety of industries,” said Dr. Sujatha Ramanujan, managing director of Luminate. “Custom Surgical is a great example of how novel inventions can be applied to solve growing global healthcare challenges like blindness and vision impairment.”
We caught up with Federico Acosta, Custom Surgical’s founder, to discuss how his company is modernizing surgery by providing an effective way to record, store, and share medical images and leverage them to diagnose and treat patients.
Tell us about your company.
At Custom Surgical, we are digitizing medical microscopes with a smartphone-based platform and enhancing their functionalities with mobile applications. Our optical system, the MicroREC, allows ophthalmologists to connect any smartphone camera to the optical path of their microscope. Our data management platform allows them to easily store and share their videos and images on the cloud.
We are also developing an Augmented Reality (AR) platform that helps ophthalmologists train during different surgical procedures and later on improve their surgical outcomes.
Currently, our products have been sold in 61 different countries through a large base of distributors and via licensing deals we have secured with major microscope manufacturers. Our software platform has been adopted by more than 3,000 specialists and is acquiring data faster than any other platform in the market.
