Today, people are prone to numerous health issues and cancer is one of the major problems which has been growing at an alarming rate. Most of the people are unaware of what type of health condition they are living with.
Various research has shown that early cancer detection can be helpful in saving the life of the person, in the cases where it would be a thin possibility otherwise. When the cancer is detected early, the prognosis and prospects of successful treatment are significantly improved. Yet, for some types of cancer and other deadly diseases, there is no current early detection examination. Or if there is, it is not conducted as a routine test or is not affordable. Additionally, current screening methods are problematic due to relatively high erroneous results. Furthermore, the time span for which the patients need to wait for the tests and their result may cost them their lives.
In order to help people detect cancer at an early stage, HT BioImaging came into existence. It will aim at saving lives and improve the quality of life of the patients suffering from life-threatening diseases. For providing this, the company has developed a platform for cancer detection that is based on a noninvasive, safe, accessible, and highly accurate system. With this system, initial screening and cancer imaging will become a simple and affordable process, easily accessible to the community. Its platform technology provides real-time results that will enable physicians to decide on the spot if additional, more expensive and high-risk testing is necessary.
Prominent Personalities of HT BioImaging
Shani Toledano is the Co-Founder & CEO of HT BioImaging. She has a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering specialized in heat transfer and thermodynamics. Working for 11 years in the tech, defense, and aviation industry as a developer, system engineer, and R&D team leader, she has gained immense experience.
Gideon Barak, the Co-Fonder & Chairman of HT BioImaging, is a serial entrepreneur with 10 exit records. He has held leading positions in several companies including co-founder and CEO of DSP Communications (NASDAQ: DSPC), acquired by Intel in 1999 for $1.6 billion, and Founder and Chairman of Envara and Butterfly VLSI, acquired by Intel and Texas Instruments in 2004 and 2000, respectively.
The journey of the company started a few years ago when Shani’s father’s chest x-ray test accidentally found a 5 cm tumor in the place where he was experiencing chest pain. Unfortunately, the cancer was in its late stage and within 9 months, her father passed away. She then started reading and understanding the occurrence of cancer. Shani used her knowledge gained from her education in heat transfer and thermodynamics to establish HT BioImaging with the help of her professor of thermodynamics and her father’s oncologist. With the help of Barak and his entrepreneur skills, she started this essential company.
Essential Products and Services
HT BioImaging is now introducing its first application – HTOScan. This application is a disruptive next-generation oral scanner for the detection of cancer and pre-cancer based on its own breakthrough patented medical imaging technology. The technology uses thermal diffusion to record the heat dissipation in the tissue which enables it to identify the observed discontinuity in the tissue as cancerous with an accuracy of 95%. It differentiates the cancerous cells from normal cells by exploiting their unique heat-flow properties. HTOScan does all these things: 1. High Accuracy and Location Coverage; 2. Non-Invasive and Low Risk; 3. Analysis and Results delivered in Real-Time; and 4. Detect malignant & premalignant lesions with no visual symptoms (submucosal lesions).
The detection process based on the fact that density of the cancerous and precancerous cells is higher than that of normal cells, their shape is different, and their nuclei are enlarged. This results in the differences that cause a fundamental change in the thermal properties of the tissue (blood flow, heat capacity, conductivity and metabolism). The functional imaging technique is used for testing the response of the tissues to the thermal excitation over a short period of time. Therefore, it can be used to distinguish between cancer and other pathologies such as pre-cancer, benign growths or necrosis as a result of cancer treatment and surgical removal.
The operating process of HTOScan is based on the principle which involves short, safe, and focused heating followed by tracking the heat expansion and absorption in the tissue. The system is a combination of a cloud-based database where the data is stored. Further, the data is processed using a unique proprietary analysis algorithm, using signal analysis, machine learning and more artificial intelligence techniques of image pattern recognition based on an ever-growing bank of data.
Future Goals
HT BioImaging has a roadmap for the next 2 years for the growth of the company. It plans on the validation of 300 patients through an algorithm along with oral device marketing version, pivotal trial, CE-Mark + initial commercialization in Europe, and FDA Approval + initial commercialization in US.
