MVision AI gains $5.8M funding to speed cancer treatment planning

Finnish medical imaging and AI startup MVision AI is on a mission to speed the cancer treatment planning process while still delivering high-quality care. Its approach calls for AI-powered automatic segmentation tooling, which lets it streamline the all-important radiotherapy treatment planning workflow. Today, the company announced it secured $5.85 million (€5.4 million) in post-seed financing.

Compared to manual treatment planning, which often requires two to three weeks of anxious waiting before radiotherapy treatment planning starts, MVision’s automation enables same-day treatment, MVision’s founder and CEO, Mahmudul Hasan, told VentureBeat.

Saving time here is crucial. The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that the number of patients treated with radiotherapy will reach upwards of 29 million by 2040.

“Our AI segmentation model takes CT and MRI scans as input and produces 3D volumes of organs and tumors. Hence, it automates radio oncologists’ manual tasks. Typically these manual tasks would take 30 minutes to 90 minutes per patient. MVision automates this in minutes,” Hasan said.

Auto-segmentation for more personalized cancer treatment

The company’s auto-segmentation tool enables a more personalized treatment plan, and enforces best practices to minimize the radiation dose to which healthy organs are exposed. More generally, it aims to standardize the quality of global cancer care, and improve clinical decision-making through its cloud-based decision support tools.

MVision’s AI segmentation models were developed by collecting image data from clinical partners. The platform has a CE-marked and FDA-cleared auto-segmentation feature for radiotherapy planning.

The company plans to release more features for a full planning and segmentation service for MR images.

According to an evaluation by Sociedad Española de Oncologia Radioterapica in Madrid, Spain, MVision AI’s technology has significantly contributed to reducing contouring time and enhancing patient care by shortening waiting times. Contour delineation refers to the part of treatment planning in which tumors are outlined along with nearby organs at risk from potential radiation toxicity.

Encouraging early results from MVision AI

After implementing MVision AI, it was reported that 44% of breast cancer scans were ready to be planned on the same day. Without MVision AI, only 10% of the scans were ready to be planned on the same day.

MVision was established in 2017 by Hasan, Saad Ullah Akrram and Jarkko Niemelä with the goal of transforming radiotherapy using innovative AI technology. The idea came to Hasan while attending a clinical training session during his time working for a major radiotherapy systems vendor. During the session, he faced the challenge of manually contouring organs from CT scans, and he realized the potential for AI to simplify the process.

Joined by Akrram and Niemelä, who are both experienced software engineers, as well as being a medical physicist and an AI research scientist, Hasan set out to improve radiology treatment using AI.

Since then, MVision has grown into a team of 30-plus professionals with extensive backgrounds in the medical industry and AI research. The company said its technology has been used to treat over 100,000 cancer patients in 14 countries, with significant wait-time reductions achieved in many facilities, including the Gainesville Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Florida.

Hasan said the new investment will be used to research and develop new solutions to speed up treatment planning for radiotherapy and build a globally scalable cloud-based platform for cancer treatment.

“We’re also looking to further expand and bring the solution [to] more patients globally,” he said. “Our mission is to build a globally scalable cloud platform for a clinical decision support system for cancer care.”