EchoSure: Vascular Anastomosis Monitoring

Each year 50,000 patients in the U.S. alone will undergo free flap reconstruction, about 15% of whom will experience non-preventable vascular complications. These surgeries have the power to restore patients’ lives, yet too often they result in failure. If signs of a vascular flow problem are detected early, surgeons can repair the vessels before it is too late − thus, monitoring is pivotal to the success of these cases. However, half of these patients suffer from costly and morbid total flap failure due to inherent flaws in current monitoring devices, despite the fact that hospitals are paying hundreds to thousands of dollars to monitor each patient after surgery.

EchoSure has developed a novel monitoring technology with the power to prevent thousands of surgical failures and avoid unnecessary and expensive re-operations, while saving hospitals over $2,200 per surgery. Current competitors have high false positive rates, non-definitive outputs, and significant time delays to identify a problem; these factors lead to decreased surgical success, unnecessary procedures, and clinical frustrations. Our unique, clinically driven insight was that Doppler ultrasound was the ideal technology for monitoring — if it could be de-skilled so front-line clinicians could use it. The result was EchoSure, a dual-component system comprised of EchoMark and EchoFind. EchoMark is an implantable, resorbable marker placed beneath the vessels of interest, which acts as a homing beacon for nurses tasked with monitoring post-operative patients. EchoFind, a software application, is used to help guide users to the ideal position with the ultrasound at which point critical information about the vessel health is gathered and used to assess the patient. This technology will help save hospitals over $180M annually while decreasing unnecessary procedures and improving outcomes.