Our Story: From Clinical Need to Innovation
Surgical complications remain a significant source of patient morbidity, prolonged hospital stays, and increased healthcare costs. Even in routine operations, outcomes often depend on the surgeon’s ability to accurately visualize and preserve delicate anatomy under challenging conditions. Current imaging and decision-support tools are limited: too disruptive to workflow, insufficiently reliable, or highly variable across institutions. This creates an urgent need for advanced, accessible technologies that can standardize surgical performance, improve safety, and reduce preventable errors.
Making Thyroid Surgery Safer
10s of 1000s of people – our friends, family, and loved ones- with thyroid cancer in the United States have their parathyroid glands accidently removed or injured during their thyroid surgery. This surgical error often causes patients to suffer from hypocalcemia complications after their surgery. This means that they may have to stay longer at the hospital, take supplements every day for the rest of their life, and have a shorter life span.
We talked to head and neck surgeons who expressed that they had difficulty visualizing the parathyroid glands (PGs) during their surgeries because of the PGs small size and similar appearance to surrounding tissues, such as lymph nodes, fat, and thyroid tissue. Another pain point was their inability to accurately assess the vascularization and perfusion of the PGs – a crucial step in preserving the glands during the surgery.
After our stakeholder interviews, we asked ourselves: how can we prevent postoperative hypocalcemia and hypoparathyroidism? What’s being done today? We learned that intraoperative identification and blood perfusion assessment of PGs are implemented as standard practice in thyroidectomies. Frozen section biopsy, a 30–50-minute procedure that allows a pathological examination of fresh samples, is not reliable as it could lead to the devascularization and destruction of functional PGs. Surgeons can also inject a dye, such as indocyanine green (ICG), to perform imaging, but this method is temporally limited and interferes with the surgical workflow.
Clinicians worldwide continue to voice concern that no affordable, suitable device currently exists to effectively preserve parathyroid function. This ongoing feedback validates both the clinical urgency and the commercial opportunity to innovate.
Transforming Biliary Surgery and Beyond
A parallel challenge exists in biliary surgery. In laparoscopic cholecystectomy, one of the most common procedures worldwide, misidentification of biliary anatomy remains the leading cause of bile duct injuries. Even routine operations can carry devastating consequences when visualization tools fail to provide sufficient clarity or reliability. These unmet needs highlight a broader problem in surgical care: the lack of standardized, reproducible imaging solutions that can consistently guide surgeons through delicate anatomy.
Looking toward the future, surgical care is also evolving toward greater standardization and automation. Variation in human performance remains a key driver of complications. Optosurgical and its partners are advancing Advanced Imaging Aided Autonomous Robotic Cholecystectomy project by integrating advanced imaging, a robust perception framework, and supervised autonomy into robotic surgery. This platform has the potential to minimize variability, improve efficiency, and ensure safer, more repeatable outcomes for patients undergoing minimally invasive procedures.
Together, these efforts, improving parathyroid gland preservation in thyroid surgery, reducing complications in biliary surgery, and pioneering supervised autonomous robotics, reflect a single vision: to bring advanced imaging and intelligent tools into the operating room, helping patients emerge from surgery stronger, healthier, and with fewer complications.