7D Surgical
Drs. Beau Standish, Adrian Mariampillai, Michael Leung, and Victor Yang met while earning their graduate degrees in medicine. They each had a drive to start a company that focused on the crossroads of medicine and technology. On June 3, 2009, 7D Surgical was incorporated but the founders had not yet settled on specific innovation. Instead, over the next 1.5 years they investigated numerous different opportunities that included optically-based technology platforms. 7D Surgical was created based off the notion of 7 degrees of freedom. The standard 6 degrees of freedom in engineering relate to a rigid body being able to freely move in a three-dimensional space. Specifically, that the body can move on the X, Y, and Z axes, as well as change orientation between those axes through rotation called pitch, yaw, and roll. The 7th Degree of freedom is the function of time. Incorporating the 7th degree of freedom allows one to fully quantify where a particle is in space at any given time.
Company details
Find locations served, office locations
- Business Type:
- Manufacturer
- Industry Type:
- Occupational Health
- Market Focus:
- Globally (various continents)
About us
THE OPPORTUNITY
The technology took an extensive amount of time, was unreliable with anatomical accuracy, cost an exorbitant amount of money, and required a lot of unnecessary radiation. This existing solution for navigating spinal anatomy didn’t solve the problem, it created more frustrations and doubts. As a result, navigation wasn’t being adopted nor trusted for spine surgery. In fact, there was no real evolution in spinal navigation technology for years, it was old and antiquated.
The founders knew that there was a massive opportunity to create a technology that would actually solve the problem at hand. They decided to create a company to develop optical and spatial technology that would revolutionize image guided surgery, despite no direct experience in software or hardware engineering for that field.
Impressively, only 4 short years later, 7D Surgical had taken an academic prototype through the rigors of regulatory approvals and achieved a successful limited launch in Canada and the US, without any VC funding.