Physical Sciences/Engineering
Cancer detection in the cloud
Colorectal cancer is one of the commonest cancers in the world. When caught in the early stages, it’s straightforward to treat, with a survival rate of over 90%. But this drops to less than 10% for patients whose cancers are found at later stages. Time, then is of the essence, which is why UCLB spinout Odin Vision was formed to utilise the benefits of cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology via a platform based on research from UCL.
Improving cancer detection with machine learning
Peter Mountney is CEO of Odin Vision, the UCLB spinout company which is commercialising this technology. At the core of his company’s offering is CADDIE’ (computer aided detection and diagnosis for endoscopy), a system which uses a database of millions of images, which have been labelled by doctors as either healthy or diseased tissue.
Through machine learning, the system begins to identify the visual characteristics associated with diseased tissue. It was developed by Professor Danail Stoyanov, a leading expert in robot vision at UCL, in collaboration with Professor Laurence Lovat, a consultant gastroenterologist at UCH.
The technology’s promise caught the eye of big investors, and in 2023, Odin Vision was acquired by Olympus, a leader in Japanese medtech, holding a 70% share in the global gastrointestinal endoscopic equipment market. Odin Vision has also been established as Olympus’ first Digital Excellence Center.
This strategic partnership is enabling the global adoption of CADDIE, which has been approved in Europe with a CE Mark and is in use in hospitals throughout the UK, Spain, Germany, Poland, and Italy. They also have plans to expand its use to the USA.
Additionally, the company has developed AI-driven software for gastroscopy that has been certified with the CE Mark, supporting doctors in examining the oesophagus for potential throat cancer indicators.
Peter Mountney, CEO of Odin Vision.
Providing instant diagnoses
Crucially, the AI doesn’t replace clinical decision-making, but allows doctors to focus on potentially diseased areas, and, with support from the technology, assess whether tissue is low or high risk of being cancerous. Because data is analysed at the time of the procedure, the doctor can give the patient an instant diagnosis that can be immediately shared with the patient, reducing the stress and anxiety associated with waiting weeks for results.
Through the NHS AI in Health and Care Award, the technology was identified as having significant potential to increase the impact of AI in the NHS. A £1m grant by the NHS AI Lab at NHSX, the Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC), and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) will fund Odin to generate further clinical evidence, enabling wider adoption within NHS hospitals. Early results show the potential for significant increases in detection rates of polyps when clinicians are supported by the AI system.
Pioneering a new spinout model
As a UCLB spinout, the company has been able to benefit from support and funding to create and grow the company. Researchers based at the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS) at UCL and the Department of Computer Science had developed an AI model to detect and classify polyps of the colon. Professor of Gastroenterology Dr. Laurence Lovat recognised the positive impact on patient outcomes of the technology developed by doctoral student Patrick Brandao and Professor Danail Stoyanov.
Although there was no clear patent protection route available, the founders and the UCLB Business Manager agreed that the proprietary algorithm and software, together with the confidential know-how of the UCL research team could be sufficient to build an interesting business proposition.
UCLB was able to recommend the Portico Ventures fixed equity model as an appropriate spinout mechanism, offering an exclusive licence of the IP (software and know-how) to the company in return for a single digit equity stake for UCL Business, non-dilutable through the first £1m of investment. With the commitment of the doctoral student who had developed the algorithm and supported by Professors Stoyanov and Lovat, the company was spun out.
UCLB supported development of a business case to secure seed funding in 2019 from the UCL Technology Fund, London Co-Investment Fund, the AI Seed Fund and angel investors. Industry leaders Dr Peter Mountney and Dr Daniel Toth, joined Odin as CEO and CTO respectively, bringing experience of translating technology from research to product.
“Odin Vision were one of the first companies to use the pioneering Portico Ventures spinout model,” explains Weng Sie Wong, Senior Business Manager at UCLB. “The model assigns UCLB a fixed equity stake in return for a licence to the spinout for UCL’s software and know-how IP assets. Other than an initial anti-dilution provision over the first £1m of external investment, the equity dilutes over time in line with other shareholders as the company raises more funds.”
A vision for global growth
With over 100 million endoscopy procedures performed worldwide every year, the potential global impact of Odin Vision’s technology platform is huge.
“The challenge is to build scalable technology that can address this large market, this is why a cloud-based endoscopy platform is so important,” explains Peter.
By creating a cloud-based endoscopy platform, the company has addressed three of the significant challenges in scaling healthcare solutions – hardware, speed to market and AI updates.
Using the cloud avoids having to deploy expensive, limited, and fast-ageing hardware into hospitals. It means hospitals have access to the latest supercomputing power and their adoption of technology is future-proofed. The cloud also provides the infrastructure to bring new products to hospitals at the click of a button, short-cutting the traditionally slow journey of bringing a new product to market. As AI moves fast, and algorithms are constantly improving, a final benefit of cloud technology is in enabling doctors to have the latest and best-performing systems without having to book an engineer to visit and perform a system update.
Odin Vision’s technology can be applied in diseases throughout the digestive tract and surgery, opening the prospect of multiple use-cases. A second product which can aid detection of oesophageal cancer called CADU has already been released via the platform.
Their flexible approach means they are well placed to adapt to the requirements of other healthcare systems around the world, something they are already exploring as part of the Innovate UK Global Business Innovation Programme.
“The challenge is to build scalable technology that can address this large market, this is why a cloud-based endoscopy platform is so important,”