MICCAI 2018 Daily - Tuesday

3Scan is focused on building robotics for the histology market. It offers large volumetric light imaging through a mixture of robotics and software analysis. We speak to Matthew Goodman , CTO of the San Francisco- based company, to find out more. Matthew tells us: “ There are a lot of companies that build microscopes out there. The thing that makes us interesting is that we do large volume. Usually when people say they do large volume, they mean cubic millimetres, but we do multiple cubic centimetres, so thousands and thousands of times bigger. We’re also very focused on automatic quantitation. Building numeric measures out of the things that we image, in a way that is repeatable and reliable .” He says they are trying to take something that is artisanal and a hand- prepared process and make it more robotic and reliable. It’s not something they can do overnight. They spent a lot of time working on the robotics parts in the first three or four years. The company was founded in 2011 and they are only now starting to do it in a routine and robust way. They have a chunk of IP around how they do the processing and analysis – they manage large data in a novel way – which is what brought Matthew to MICCAI this year to give a talk at a satellite event. Coming up, they have a product launch around vascular imaging. It’s called Vascular Fingerprint , because it’s a mechanism to quantify some vascular features that are important to a couple of different research domains. After that, they have several other smaller offerings and research projects that they do, especially in the H&E space. They have started doing tissue capture and secondary analysis, which is very interesting to a lot of people. 3Scan has around 40 employees and although based in San Francisco , has a number of people working remotely in other locations including Chicago and Berlin . Speaking about where the company is at now, Matthew jokes: “ It’s in its teenage years, where it’s kind of angsty and has to go and get a job! ” They have been successful with VC rounds in the past, and may do another round this year, but are also finding alternative sources of funding: “ We’re starting to bring in more and more contracts, so an increasing amount of our day-to-day money actually comes from customers, which is really exciting .” The company has a couple of positions open at the moment, but Matthew prefers to have your résumé and talk to you, and then if a position opens up, he will remember you and be in touch. Being a small company, jobs roles aren’t 100% defined, so there are opportunities to bring in people with relevant skills from different areas. 7 Tuesday 3scan