TORONTO – Arthrolense Inc. has just seen its bank balance swell after Lynx Equity Ltd. invested $2 million to further develop the startup’s augmented, mixed reality surgical guidance systems for hip and knee replacement. According to orthopedic surgeon and company CEO David Backstein the Arthrolense system uses vastly improved hologram-based technologies to solve problems that persist in computer navigation and robotic systems.

TORONTO – Startup company Stoko Inc. has raised C$6 million (US$4.74 million) in seed funding to accelerate market expansion of a device it said will give rigid knee braces a run for their money.

TORONTO – An initial investment of $250,000 by MCI Onehealth Technologies Inc. could just be the beginning for Ariel Precision Medicine Inc. and an artificial intelligence-fueled platform that uses genetic and clinical data to identify early symptoms of chronic disease.

TORONTO – Ambu Inc. has won Health Canada clearance for a flexible, single-use cystoscope for diagnosing, managing, and treating lower urinary disorders such as incontinence and bladder cancer. The disposable Ascope 4 Cysto system goes head-to-head with reusable urology scopes that must be reprocessed after each use, diminishing image quality and mechanical performance, said Jens Kemp, Ambu’s vice president of marketing for North America.

TORONTO – Audioptics Medical Inc. has raised a C$1.9 million (US$1.5 million) seed investment round for development of a device that visualizes and assesses the structures of the middle ear to help patients avoid surgery for conductive hearing loss. Audioptics Medical CEO Dan MacDougall told BioWorld the investment marks a major step in his company’s path towards commercial development of its flagship product, the Ossiview Middle Ear Imaging system.

TORONTO – Opsens Inc. has inked an agreement with Madrid, Spain’s Cathmedical Cardiovascular SA to integrate its coronary physiology algorithms with the Spanish firm’s next generation hemodynamic system, notably Opsens’ diastolic pressure ratio (DPR) for measuring diastolic heart pressure.

TORONTO – Breath analytics technology developed by Picomole Inc. and University of New Brunswick (UNB) researchers promises to identify lung cancer long before it reaches the most advanced stages of the disease. Machine learning sits at the heart of the system, evaluating raw spectral data from a patient’s breath for early diagnosis of lung cancer, Steve Graham, CEO of Moncton, New Brunswick-based Picomole, told BioWorld.

TORONTO – Perimeter Medical Imaging Inc. has been awarded an FDA breakthrough device designation for a machine learning medical platform it said drives ultra-high-resolution, real-time imaging of breast cancer. Data collected from multiple pathology labs in Texas this past year were fed through the optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging system which now is at the stage where its Imgassist artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms can be tested.

TORONTO – For Scott Kadwell, president of Markham, Ontario-based RSK Medical Inc., the distributor tagged to sell the Health Canada approved Gammacore Sapphire, the device represents “a shift from a business to business to a direct-to-consumer business model.” For Rockaway, N.J.’s Electrocore Inc. which developed the self-administered technology, it’s one more regulator to have greenlighted the FDA cleared, CE-marked device for treating intractable migraine and cluster headache.

TORONTO – Exact Imaging Inc. has secured C$5.1 million (US$4 million) from the Business Development Bank of Canada and federal Export Development Canada to drive adoption of its Exactvu micro-imaging platform for real-time imaging of the prostate. Company CEO Randy Aucoin said it’s been a slow process getting street cred for his prostate imager, investing “tens of millions of dollars” in a direct sales force that eventually installed 100 systems in the U.S., Europe and Canada.