Segasist receives $750,000 in capital for spinoff

Venture capitalists have delivered $750,000 in start-up funding for a new company that will distribute software developed in a UW systems design engineering lab.

The software is Segasist™. It comes from a lab where work has been under way for years on “intelligent segmentation” of medical images. The inventor team includes faculty member Hamid Tizhoosh and three former PhD students: Shahryar Rahnamayan (now a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology), Farhang Sahba (a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto), and Maryam Shokri (now a scientist with Segasist™).

Segmentation — looking at the data from an MRI, X-ray or ultrasound image in regular thin slices to locate, measure and identify a feature or a tumour — is “identified by radiologists as a tedious and time-consuming task”, says Sam Visaisouk of UW’s research office, who has played a key role in turning the Segasist™ software from a lab curiosity into a marketable product.

Visaisouk is “entrepreneur-in-residence” in the research office’s Waterloo Commercialization Office, where half a dozen staff members are available to work with faculty on commercializing the results of their research. Sometimes the result is a licensing agreement by which a large company buys the rights to an invention. But other times, as with OMISA, a whole new company is created, with ambitions of multi-million-dollar revenues if everything goes well.

Segasist is one of about 20 companies that have been created in that way, says Tom Corr, associate vice-president (commercialization) and the manager of the intellectual property group. As with most of the other companies, the university has taken a 25 per cent share in the ownership — and the eventual profits — while the researchers own the other 75 per cent.

“WatCo developed the business model, business plan and financing plan that led to a $750,000 investment by First Leaside Vision Fund,” says Corr. First Leaside is a well-established investment firm that’s beginning to get interested in high-tech companies since the provincial government created the Ontario Commercialization Investment Funds to carry a share of the financial risk.

In the current economic situation, “the venture capital market is in terrible shape,” says Corr, so the company’s investment is a big vote of confidence in the UW-created technology and its market potential.

What next? “WatCo has recruited Jacqueline Csonka-Peeren as president to manage the company, and she has secured an OCE grant to support some of the technical development. . . . We’re ready to transform this into commercial software.” Testing and tweaking will take place over the next year or so at research hospitals in Canada and the United States.

The selling point for Segasist™, says Visaisouk, is “the novel learning capability of the technology, providing faster image processing, at high accuracy, than any commercially available method. Determining whether a guy’s going to live or die based on a fuzzy image is a lot of responsibility! Segasist™ learns and improves its segmentation ability through on-line clinician training and feedback. It can drastically reduce the time required to segment an image.”

A major potential market is the companies that make medical imaging equipment, but the new firm also intends to make Segasist™ available to clinicians and remote practitioners, who can use it to read medical images and make diagnoses faster and better, Visaisouk said.

Segasist
Segmentation becomes quick and efficient with the help of Segasist™