Vicarious Surgical--VR meets surgery

 Vicarious surgical raised $17 m VC money to further develop its VR-based surgical robot.

“Vicarious Surgical is using miniaturized robotics and immersive virtual reality to give surgeons superpowers, exponentially improving visibility and accuracy in minimally invasive surgery,” added Innovation Endeavors founding partner Dror Berman. “This approach is poised to drive a super evolution in surgical care that will save lives.” 

"A system for use in surgery includes a central body, a visualization system operably connected to the central body, a video rendering system, a head-mounted display for displaying images from the video rendering system, a sensor system, and a robotic device operably connected to the central body. The visualization system includes at least one camera and a pan system and/or a tilt system. The sensor system tracks the position and/or orientation in space of the head-mounted display relative to a reference point. The pan system and/or the tilt system are configured to adjust the field of view of the camera in response to information from the sensor system about changes in at least one of position and orientation in space of the head-mounted display relative to the reference point."

Cambridge, Mass.-based Vicarious, which first reported a $2.4 million raise in January 2016 and another $800,000 in October of that year, opened the Series A round in January with a nearly $13 million installment. Today the company said Khosla Ventures and Innovation Endeavors led the $16.8 million Series A, joined by Gates Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures and Salesforce founder & CEO Marc Benioff. The proceeds are earmarked for continued development and team expansion, Vicarious said.

In a prepared statement Vicarious said its device “combines virtual reality with proprietary human-like surgical robotics to enable surgeons to perform minimally invasive surgery through a single micro-incision,” claiming to have achieved “the goal of surgical robotics since the field’s inception – to shrink the surgeon and put them inside the patient.”

Source: MassDevice, US20170181802A1