Invenio Imaging Files IPO Prospectus for AI-Powered Intraoperative Cancer Diagnostics Platform

Medical device company Invenio Imaging is developing a technology that enables surgeons to evaluate tissue biopsies immediately after sample collection in the operating room. While traditional pathology laboratories typically require weeks to deliver comprehensive analytical results, this AI-accelerated technology reduces the turnaround time to just three minutes.

During surgical biopsy, healthcare professionals extract cell or tissue samples, which are then analyzed by pathologists to determine the presence of cancer or other diseases. Invenio Imaging plans to deploy an AI-driven compact imaging system in procedure rooms to facilitate rapid clinical decision-making through features such as real-time detection.

Chris Freudiger, Chief Technology Officer of this Silicon Valley company, stated, “This technology can assist surgeons in making real-time decisions during biopsies or surgical procedures. Leveraging the AI models under development by Invenio, surgeons will be able to rapidly assess whether tissue samples contain cancer cells, thereby determining the need for additional sample collection. This enables molecular diagnosis within minutes and facilitates the delivery of personalized treatment plans.”

The faster the diagnosis, the quicker treatment can be initiated. This is particularly critical for aggressive cancers. Specialized pathology laboratories often require several weeks to deliver biopsy results, during which time such cancers may grow significantly or spread extensively.

NVIDIA Inception provides technical support and AI platform guidance to leading startups, with Invenio Imaging Inc. being one of its member companies. Invenio Imaging Inc. leverages NVIDIA GPUs and software libraries to accelerate AI training and inference.

Focusing on Cancer Treatment

NIO Laser Imaging System Accelerates Imaging Speed for Fresh Tissue Biopsies

Invenio Imaging’s NIO laser imaging system is a digital pathology tool that accelerates the imaging of fresh tissue biopsies. The system has been used in thousands of surgical procedures across the United States and Europe, and received CE marking certification in Europe in 2021.

The company plans to adopt the NVIDIA Jetson Orin series of edge AI modules in its next-generation imaging systems. The next-generation systems will feature near real-time AI inference capabilities accelerated by the NVIDIA TensorRT SDK.

Freudiger stated, “We are building a layer of AI models on top of our imaging capabilities to provide physicians with diagnostic images and image analysis. Leveraging the edge AI performance provided by NVIDIA Jetson, physicians will be able to rapidly determine which types of cancer cells are present in biopsy images.”

Invenio Imaging Inc. utilizes an NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU cluster to train neural networks with tens of millions of parameters on images annotated by pathologists. Developed using the TensorFlow deep learning framework, these models are also trained on images acquired by the NIO imaging system.

Freudiger stated, “From our perspective, the expanded VRAM on the RTX A6000 GPU delivers robust performance, enabling us to load large batches of images and capture their feature variations. This has fundamentally transformed AI training.”

Path to Clinical Deployment

NIO Glioma Reveal, one of Invenio Imaging’s AI products designed to identify cancerous regions in brain tissue, has been approved for clinical use in Europe and is already being utilized for academic research in the United States.

A team of Invenio collaborators from the University of Michigan, New York University, the University of California, San Francisco, the Medical University of Vienna, and the University Hospital Cologne has recently developed a deep learning model capable of identifying cancer tumor biomarkers within 90 seconds with an accuracy rate of up to 93%.

By leveraging the ability to analyze different molecular subtypes of cancer in tissue samples, physicians can predict the extent of a patient’s response to chemotherapy or determine whether the tumor has been successfully resected during surgery.

In addition to its research in brain tissue analysis, Invenio Imaging Inc. announced this year a clinical research collaboration with Johnson & Johnson under the Lung Cancer Initiative. The two parties will jointly develop and validate an AI solution designed to assist in the evaluation of lung biopsies. This AI model will help physicians more rapidly determine whether cancer cells are present in the collected tissue samples.

Lung cancer is one of the deadliest cancers. In the United States alone, more than 1.5 million patients are diagnosed with pulmonary nodules each year. Once Invenio Imaging’s NIO Lung Cancer Reveal tool receives approval for clinical use, it will effectively reduce the time required for patients to undergo tissue biopsy.

To this end, Invenio Imaging Inc. will conduct a round of clinical studies before submitting its AI solution powered by NVIDIA Jetson for FDA approval.