I met ByungJoon Park, CEO of Decasite, in a cancer ward, where he had just performed a lung cancer surgery.
Before becoming a startup CEO, Park was a professor of thoracic surgery at Chung-Ang University Hospital, where he performed more than 2,000 lung cancer surgeries.
"I have saved more than 2,000 patients so far, and if I continue to operate, I can save more patients, but at some point, I felt the limitations of modern medical technology," Park said.
Currently, it is not possible to know the exact location of organs or lesions in a patient's body, so they often have to start with open surgery, he added.
Sometimes, when a patient's lungs are opened for suspected lung cancer, it turns out to be inflammation, not cancer.
"The patient was relieved that it wasn't cancer, but as a doctor, I was eager to develop a technology that could accurately identify the location of the tumor," Park said.
Park developed a technology that synchronizes three-dimensional reconstructed medical images with the patient's body through augmented reality (AR) technology.
It is a navigation technology that goes inside the body during surgery and shows the location of invisible needles and tumors directly to the surgeon.
Through the system, doctors can see the inside of the body and the position of the needle in real time, as if through a prism.
"It is possible to perform a biopsy on a cancerous mass of less than one centimeter, which was impossible to diagnose without surgery," Park said, "and it is possible to replace injection treatment for back pain with a radiation-free procedure."
Excerpted from the original
