Rob Krummen, Vektor Medical - AI-based Non-Invasive Arrhythmia Analysis | LSI USA '24

Rob Krummen  0:00  
Rob, good afternoon. I'm Rob Krummen, the CEO of Vektor Medical , and I'd like to start a conversation with you today about a global health care crisis called arrhythmia, and vector medical's role in that health care crisis, in solving it. So in the beginning of that conversation, as you're going to say, Rob, I didn't realize that arrhythmia was a global health care crisis, and honestly, I can't even spell arrhythmia. So let's talk about what an arrhythmia is. Arrhythmia is an irregular heartbeat. What it happens is that are electrical signals a faulty circuit in your heart that causes your heart to beat improperly. We often see it as heartbeat That's too fast or too slow. What I'm going to focus on mostly is an irregular heartbeat. So how big is this global health crisis? Well, I'm not a mathematician, but I'll tell you, it's pretty big. It's the number one cause of death in the world. One in four adults over the age of 40 will develop a serious arrhythmia, and if you don't get it treated, arrhythmias are the number one or a major contributor to stroke and dementia. To put those numbers in perspective, today, the number one arrhythmia is atrial fibrillation. You hear a lot about it in this space. It's estimated that 37 million people living with diagnosed atrial fibrillation. To put that in perspective, 17 million people live with diagnosed cancer, all cancers put together. So what's the standard of care in the industry? What are we doing to help these patients? Well, the amazing thing is, if you go in and get a procedure called an ablation, and you hit the target, the source of that arrhythmia, that faulty circuit, your heart returns to sinus rhythm in atrial fibrillation. The standard of care is pulmonary vinyl, pulmonary vein isolation. What you see here is your left atria coming out at you. The four branches that look like broccoli, those are your pulmonary veins. And the standard of care is to what you see in those red dots is to burn around the pulmonary veins and hope that your arrhythmia source was in the pulmonary veins. Unfortunately, depending on the study the year and who did it, how motivated they were, the success rate for pulmonary vein isolation is between 40 and 60% at the one year mark. That's not good enough. You'll also hear in this space incredible advances called PFA. That's one side of the equation. PFA likely will end up being a better way to burn but when we look at the equation, there's another side. We need to make sure we're treating the patient in the proper place, and that's where VMAP comes in. VMAP is vector. Medical is technology. It's the only FDA cleared, clinically validated, non invasive, oddly spaced, AI based solution for rhythmia analysis, intended to improve ablation outcomes and procedural efficiency. When we started working on VMAP, we had one goal, improve outcomes for patients with our doctors around the United States. Three more value propositions have come out. The second one there should be intuitive. When you know where you need to go at the beginning of a procedure or ahead of the procedure, it makes for a more efficient procedure. Additionally, you can accelerate more patients to the most effective treatment. What does that mean? If you show a patient what their heart looks like, what the source of their arrhythmia is, head of their procedure, they're more likely to go get that procedure. It demystifies the process. The other thing to keep in mind is, and I want you to think about the math here for a second. I know a lot of doctors. You probably do too. 90% of doctors will tell you they're in the top 10% of their field. The truth is that 50% of doctors are below average. Think about it, and VMAP helps all of them. VMAP helps the lowest performers improve their skills, and VMAP helps the best performers, the KOLs, improve their practice as well. I may not have mentioned this, but this is a really important differentiation. Our arrhythmia analysis uses just the 12 lead ECG. Why is that important? Because the 12 lead ECG is the most used test in cardiology. We get it from remote monitoring, we get it from our doctor's office, we get it from the emergency room, we get it from our cardiologist, and we get it from our electrophile. From our electrophysiologist, and any time we capture the arrhythmia in any of those modalities, I can give you information that's useful for your doctor for treating your arrhythmia, but you don't have to take my word for it. I'm delighted to show you our third peer reviewed study on the impacts of VMAP. This is our time study. This is what I was talking about. Time reduction in an eight hour procedure, if you can save 25% and a $2,500 per hour electrophysiology room, that's significant savings for the hospital and the healthcare system. There's also reduction in fluoroscopy, which is a safety issue, and when you can clear an EP lab. More quickly you can get another patient in. Let's talk about the hardest types of arrhythmias, unstable VT, unstable ventricular tachycardia. This one is the one you hear the saying, heart attack send you to the ER. Unstable VT sends you to the morgue. We're delighted to say that the use of VMAP was associated with significant decreases in VT recurrence and death. There's the p value in the most common and we were delighted to share this just a month ago at the AF symposium. We took two arms of the study. We have the standard of care, PVI, which I showed you earlier, and the VMAP study arm, which was PVI plus ablation guided by VMAP, and you can see the difference that one year follow up, 48% for the standard of care, 86 and a half percent for the VMAP study arm. I also want to say that there are a lot of incredible companies are working in this space, trying to tackle the arrhythmia crisis, and we're plot platform agnostic. We're delighted to work with any of them, regardless of what systems you're using in your EP lab, in your cath lab, we can work with you for better outcomes, but we're not going to rest on our laurels. AI is an incredible tool, and these are some of the things we're working on in a research labs. ECG, AI, which allows for automatic co registration with electro anatomic mapping imaging. Ai, which I'll talk about in a second, and CRM, AI, Mass. What is CRM, cardiac rhythm management, the other side of two fastest, two slow heartbeats, a big problem in CRM are there are non responders. You may put in a device and the patient doesn't get better. We believe effective placement of these devices will lead those non responders to be responders, and will help those patients too. I said, we get to imaging AI. I want to show you, it's pretty cool. So we all know. We've all experienced chat GPT. AI can see things we can't see. So on the very far left at the bottom, we have a cardiac CT, takes a doctor several hours to be able to get a complex understanding of the thickness of the heart for their ablation. AI can do it in minutes. We blend that color image that shows thickness, heart thickness with our ECG analysis, do I talk by later, and you get robust information leading to a more effective ablation? I also want to thank LSI. It's been a big part of our company's history. We will be going to LSI EU 24 but the truth is, we recently announced our fundraising series a $16 million and thanks to Solus bio ventures and TBM life sciences, both of which are LSI alumni, we had the opportunity to move forward with our commercialization of VMAP, enhance clinical support and conduct further studies. We're also working on reimbursement, and we look forward to having conversations with each of you about how we tackle the arrhyth crisis, we'll be here for the rest of the week. Look forward to talking with you and thanks so much applause.