Therapixel

Set up in 2013 by Olivier Clatz (INRIA Sophia Antipolis – Méditerranée) and Pierre Fillard (INRIA Saclay Ile-de-France), Therapixel has emerged as one of the leading start-ups specializing in artificial intelligence applied to medical imaging.

The company started life by developing Fluid, a medical imaging software for touchless medical images navigation in operating rooms. This tool allows surgeons to visualize X-rays, CT, MRI etc and to navigate within the interface remotely using gestures. This prevents sterile gloves from contamination by computing equipment and saves time in accessing medical images needed during the procedure. The product, marketed since 2015, enabled the company to raise 600,000 euros in seed money in 2015.

The pivotal moment came in 2017 when the start-up won the DREAM Digital Mammography Challenge, an international competition that pits almost 1,200 research teams against each other as they attempt to devise algorithms for use in mammogram diagnostic assistance. What made this such a challenging undertaking was the vast quantity of data to be processed (640,000 anonymous digital mammogram images, taken from more than 86,000 patients) coupled with extremely limited computing resources (14 days in the Amazon cloud).

Since then, the algorithm has been further refined to interpret mammograms, enabling highly reliable breast cancer detection at first reading.

In June 2020 Therapixel decided to sell its surgical products unit Therapixel Suite to Videomed in order to entirely concentrate on the radiology domain.

The product, MammoScreen is FDA cleared and CE marked.

Therapixel’s research teams operate out of Paris, while the software development side is based in Nice.