RealView Imaging
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| RealView Imaging | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Industry | Medical imaging, holography |
| Founder | Aviad Kaufman, Shaul Gelman, Carmel Rotschild |
| Headquarters | Yokneam Illit, Israel |
| Notable Personnel | Shimon Eckhouse (chairman), Shaul Gelman (co-founder), Aviad Kaufman (co-founder), Carmel Rotschild (co-founder, scientific director), Elchanan Bruckheimer (medical director) |
| Products | HOLOSCOPE-i |
| Website | https://realviewimaging.com |
RealView Imaging is an Israeli medical technology company, based in Yokneam Illit, that develops real-time interactive holography for medical imaging.[1][2] Its product, the HOLOSCOPE-i, turns CT scans and 3D ultrasound data into three-dimensional holograms that float in free space within a physician's reach, where they can be rotated, sliced, marked and measured by hand before and during interventional procedures.[3] The U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the system through the 510(k) process in May 2021.[4][5]
The company is relevant to augmented reality because it builds its displays on computer-generated holography instead of the per-eye stereoscopic images used by most AR and VR headsets, and it presents this as a way to avoid the vergence-accommodation conflict.[6] In January 2017 VR press reported its plans to adapt the technology into an AR headset called HOLOSCOPE.[7] The product the company brought to market is not head-worn: the HOLOSCOPE-i hangs above the physician on an "over-the-head" mount and needs no headset or special eyewear.[4]
History
Founding and first clinical study
RealView was founded by Aviad Kaufman, Shaul Gelman and Carmel Rotschild, with a seed investment led by Shimon Eckhouse, who became chairman of the board.[8] According to the company's biographies, Gelman had previously led R&D programs on augmented reality head-mounted displays for pilots at Elbit Systems, and Kaufman had worked at Lipman Electronics and Rafael. Eckhouse is a co-founder of Syneron Medical. Rotschild, a professor at the Technion, is the company's scientific director.[1]
In late 2013 Philips and RealView announced the completion of a pilot study at Schneider Children's Medical Center in Petah Tikva. It involved eight patients and used RealView's technology to display live 3D holographic images acquired by Philips interventional X-ray and cardiac ultrasound systems. The physicians kept their usual 2D screens and also saw dynamic 3D images of the heart floating in the air, without special eyewear, which they could manipulate by touching the holographic volumes. Kaufman, then RealView's CEO, said he saw "clear indications that 3D medical holography will play an important role in medical imaging in the near future."[9]
A peer-reviewed feasibility study of the company's purpose-built prototype appeared in European Heart Journal - Cardiovascular Imaging in August 2016. Its authors were Elchanan Bruckheimer, Rotschild, Tamir Dagan, Gabriel Amir, Kaufman, Gelman and Einat Birk. Eight patients were enrolled: five underwent transcatheter atrial septal defect closure guided by 3D transesophageal echocardiography, and three were evaluated with 3D rotational angiography. Dynamic real-time and static holograms were created in standard catheterization laboratory conditions; four observers identified all anatomical landmarks on the holographic display independently of the 2D display; marking, cropping and rotation were performed; and no adverse events occurred. The authors concluded that the technology's impact "needs to be evaluated in controlled clinical trials."[10]
HOLOSCOPE headset plans (2017)
In a guest article for Road to VR on 20 January 2017, Oliver Kreylos reported that RealView had announced plans to turn its earlier desktop holographic display into an augmented reality headset called HOLOSCOPE, which the company said would solve the vergence-accommodation conflict that affects headsets such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Microsoft HoloLens. RealView said its display used "real interference-pattern based holograms" and published a video that it said was shot through the display without added effects; Kreylos judged the footage likely genuine. He also noted that the company gave no figures for resolution, frame rate, brightness or field of view, did not mention head tracking, and showed a medical system that was a large, non-head-mounted apparatus, while other product images appeared to be concept renders.[7] The Japanese site Mogura VR, a Road to VR partner, summarized the report on 21 January 2017.[11]
Display Daily's Norbert Hildebrand wrote in February 2017 that RealView described itself as developing interactive live holography as the basis for an AR headset, and that the company's own description of interference-based holography suggested the use of spatial light modulators. He added that RealView had not responded to requests for technical details and that its prototype work appeared to have targeted medical applications.[12] No RealView headset had been released by October 2026; the company's website describes the HOLOSCOPE-i as its first medical holography product and does not list a head-mounted model.[3]
Commercial installations and funding (2019-2021)
According to the company, in 2019 it unveiled the first installation of the HOLOSCOPE-i commercial configuration at Toronto General Hospital, in the presence of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.[8] On 22 July 2020 it announced a 10 million US dollar Series C round. New investors included OurCrowd and Judith and Kobi Richter; existing shareholders including Eckhouse, Zohar Gilon and Uzia Galil also took part. Kobi Richter, founder and chairman of Medinol, and Michael Eldar, a former director of the Cardiology Institute at Sheba Medical Center, joined the board.[8] Calcalist reported that the company then had 13 employees at its Yokneam office and had disclosed 20 million US dollars in total investment.[13]
The FDA received the HOLOSCOPE-i 510(k) submission (K210072) on 11 January 2021 and found the device substantially equivalent on 14 May 2021, classifying it as a radiological image processing system (product code LLZ).[5] RealView announced the clearance on 2 August 2021. The same release said the company had expanded its Series C round to 15 million US dollars earlier that year; participants included Judith and Kobi Richter, the Lowy Medical Research Institute, Rami Ungar, OurCrowd and Club100Plus Investments Group.[4][14] The announcement also said a commercial HOLOSCOPE-i had recently been installed at Schneider Children's Medical Center, quoted Gelman as CEO and co-founder, and quoted Eckhouse as saying the company would focus on commercialization in North America and planned to expand to additional countries over the following year.[4] The company's patent portfolio grew from 35 filed and 21 granted in July 2020 to 39 patents with 28 granted in August 2021.[8][4]
Europe (2024) and current status
On 14 March 2024 the Herz- und Diabeteszentrum NRW (HDZ NRW) in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, announced that it had become the first center in Europe to use the HOLOSCOPE-i, which it said was then available in Europe only at HDZ NRW. Its cardiologists generate the holograms during structural heart interventions from transesophageal echocardiography data and can turn, enlarge, crop and measure the patient's heart with their fingertips. Volker Rudolph, director of the center's Clinic for General and Interventional Cardiology, described it as "not an optical illusion, but a high-resolution, dynamic 3D projection in the air".[15]
As of October 2026 the company's website remained online and was recruiting. The leadership team listed on the website named Eckhouse as chairman, Kaufman as CEO and founder, and Gelman as president, founder and COO, which differs from the 2021 announcement that named Gelman as CEO.[1][2][4]
Technology
RealView calls its approach Digital Light Shaping. The company says its products take any 3D input data, compute the corresponding interference patterns, generate holograms with spatial light modulators and allow direct interaction through sensors, all in real time. It contrasts this with commercial AR products that, in its description, project one 2D picture per eye with a single focal plane, whereas its holograms have "numerous and dynamic focus planes" and no vergence-accommodation conflict.[6] These are the company's claims; the independent press coverage cited here did not measure them.
In a November 2021 article, Display Daily's Chris Chinnock described the HOLOSCOPE-i as a boom-mounted head-up display rather than an eyeglasses-style device. Based on information from the company, he wrote that it uses a specially modified spatial light modulator lit by red, green and blue coherent light sources. Incoming volumetric data is cut into depth slices, each slice is transformed to the frequency domain to create an interference pattern written to the modulator, and the depth of each plane is encoded so that the stacked image planes form a volume displayed at 60 frames per second. Gelman said the system tracks the positions of the viewer's pupils at high frequency to an accuracy of about 1/3 mm so the image stays spatially aligned, that its eye relief accommodates users who wear glasses, and that the interference patterns are computed on commercial GPUs. Interaction uses Intel RealSense hand tracking, voice commands and a wireless 3D control device. The article put the Digital Light Shaping patents at 39 in 16 families, 28 of them granted.[16]
Products
| Product | Form | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| HOLOSCOPE-i | Over-the-head holographic display for interventional procedures | FDA 510(k) clearance K210072, 14 May 2021; installed at Toronto General Hospital (2019), Schneider Children's Medical Center (by 2021) and HDZ NRW (2024) | Uses CT and 3D ultrasound data; no headset or eyewear[4][5][8][15] |
| HOLOSCOPE-x | System to project 3D holographic images registered inside the patient's body | Under development (2020) | Described by the company for minimally invasive procedures, with Display Daily naming interventional oncology as a target[8][16] |
| HOLOSCOPE AR headset | Head-mounted holographic AR display | Announced plans reported in January 2017; not released | No specifications published[7] |
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "RealView Imaging - Medical Holography Company". RealView Imaging. https://realviewimaging.com/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Contact". RealView Imaging. https://realviewimaging.com/contact/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Medical Holography". RealView Imaging. https://realviewimaging.com/medical/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 "RealView Imaging Ltd., World Leader in Medical Holography, Receives FDA Clearance for its Groundbreaking HOLOSCOPE-i Holographic System". PR Newswire. RealView Imaging. 2021-08-02. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/realview-imaging-ltd-world-leader-in-medical-holography-receives-fda-clearance-for-its-groundbreaking-holoscope-i-holographic-system-301346010.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 "510(k) Premarket Notification K210072: HOLOSCOPE-i". U.S. Food and Drug Administration. https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfpmn/pmn.cfm?ID=K210072. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Digital Light Shaping technology". RealView Imaging. https://realviewimaging.com/technology/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Oliver Kreylos (2017-01-20). "'HOLOSCOPE' Headset Claims to Solve AR Display Hurdle with True Holography". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/realview-holoscope-ar-headset-hologram-display/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 "RealView Imaging Ltd., the World Leader in Medical Holography, Completes its $10M Series C Funding Round". PR Newswire. RealView Imaging. 2020-07-22. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/realview-imaging-ltd-the-world-leader-in-medical-holography-completes-its-10m-series-c-funding-round-301097853.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ Gali Weinreb (2013-11-05). "Philips, RealView Imaging complete 3D heart hologram study". Globes. https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-1000891554. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ Elchanan Bruckheimer, Carmel Rotschild, Tamir Dagan, Gabriel Amir, Aviad Kaufman, Shaul Gelman, Einat Birk (2016-08). "Computer-generated real-time digital holography: first time use in clinical medical imaging". European Heart Journal - Cardiovascular Imaging, vol. 17, no. 8, pp. 845-849. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehjci/jew087. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ "RealView、"真のホログラム技術"を謳うARヘッドセットを開発中". Mogura VR. 2017-01-21. https://www.moguravr.com/?p=33931. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ Norbert Hildebrand (2017-02-03). "Real View - The Longing for the true Hologram". Display Daily. https://displaydaily.com/real-view-the-longing-for-the-true-hologram/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ Meir Orbach (2020-07-22). "Israeli medtech startup RealView Imaging raises $10 million for medical holograms system". CTech by Calcalist. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3841044,00.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ Meir Orbach (2021-08-02). "RealView Imaging expands Series C to $15 million, receives FDA clearance for holographic system". CTech by Calcalist. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3914003,00.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Anna Reiss (2024-03-14). "Premiere in Europe: Holography in Cardiac Medicine". idw - Informationsdienst Wissenschaft. Herz- und Diabeteszentrum NRW. https://idw-online.de/en/news830317. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Chris Chinnock (2021-11-12). "RealView Debuts Interference-based Volumetric Holography for Medical Applications". Display Daily. https://displaydaily.com/realview-debuts-interference-based-volumetric-holography-for-medical-applications/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.