Surgical care startup Medivis Inc. tallied $20 million in a series A financing led by Thrive Capital. The funds will be used to advance its 3D holographic clinical visualization system. Initialized Capital and Mayo Clinic also participated in the round, along with investors Bob Iger, Kevin Durant, Robert Spetzler, Hugo Barra and Coalition Operators. With the funding from the series A, Medivis has raised a total of roughly $25 million to date.

Gamma imaging is about to move out of the centralized nuclear medicine department and to the point of care, with the start of a U.S. study of a portable device Seracam, under development by Serac Imaging Systems Ltd. The study, at Ohio State University, will compare the performance of Seracam to its larger, fixed, counterpart in imaging the same patients, on the same day.

Boston Scientific Corp. said that three-year primary patency and the four-year freedom from target lesion revascularization (TLR) rate for patients treated with the Ranger drug-coated balloon (DCB), in the Ranger II superficial femoral artery (SFA) study, are the best ever reported data for randomized trials using DCBs.

Surmodics Inc. is poised to jump on the market for below the knee thrombectomy now that its Pounce platform with a low-profile (LP) model has FDA 510(k) clearance. The system can now effectively clear organized clots from vessels as small as 2 mm in diameter. The Pounce LP expands the Eden Prairie, Minn.-based company’s “grab-go-flow” platform. In its first iteration, Pounce enabled removal of thrombi and emboli in peripheral arteries 3.5 mm to 6 mm in diameter.

Cardiorenal SAS reported it has been granted a breakthrough device designation by the U.S. FDA for its Tenor at-home blood potassium measuring device. The Tenor smart device combines multiple technologies, app and cloud capabilities to assist patients with chronic kidney disease in measuring their blood potassium levels from home, obtaining results in under five minutes.

Vivolta BV raised €7 million ($US7.56 million) in new financing from existing shareholders and the Dutch government to expand its Medispin platform, an automated medical electrospinning production system, for high-throughput manufacturing of tubular electrospun products such as vascular stent grafts and prosthetic heart valves. The funds will also allow the company to continue to evolve into a medical electrospinning contract development and manufacturing organization as it transitions away from an equipment manufacturer.

Biosency SAS recently unveiled the latest results on its predictive digital medical device for remote monitoring of patient suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The Bora platform demonstrated its ability to predict COPD exacerbation on average three days prior to hospitalization.

Beneficiaries in the U.S. Medicare program have access to several technologies and procedures for treatment of glaucoma, but Medicare administrative contractors (MACs) seem to be looking sideways at some of these offerings. Both Wisconsin Physician Services and Palmetto GBA have floated draft local coverage proposals that deem procedures such as goniotomy and the combination of canaloplasty and trabeculectomy to be investigational, suggesting that claims for these and other services and devices will not be paid by these MACs.

In collaborating with Novo Nordisk A/S, privately held Aspect Biosystems Ltd. entered its biggest ever deal that could bring in more than $2.6 billion while advancing its 3D, bioprinted tissue therapeutics technology. The two companies will collaborate to develop up to four diabetes and/or obesity products, a Novo specialty, using implantable bioprinted tissues to replace, repair or supplement human biological functions. The initial target will be type 1 diabetes.