The Birth of Orthoscan

By Larry Grossman, Founder and first CEO, Orthoscan, Inc. Excerpted from Serial Entrepreneur, January 2010

I was always looking to be a niche player in any company that I ran. So, with that in mind, I had an idea.

I knew there was still a substantial turf battle between radiologists and orthopedic surgeons. I was going to use this fact to my advantage by making a product to be marketed and sold to orthopedic surgeons. The other competitors were selling only to radiologists in hospitals, leaving the surgery center and office clinic markets untouched. 

I came up with the product name of Orthoscan. The Orthoscan Mini C-arm was manufactured and designed with an orthopedic surgeon in mind. The machine was a 100% American-made product manufactured in Scottsdale, Arizona.

After I sold Fluoroscan to Hologic, they immediately made the Mini C-arm into a radiology product. G.E. Healthcare had always marketed their mini c-arm as a radiology product. Both companies practically ignored the orthopedic surgeon rather than alienate radiologists. 

We changed the name of American C-arm, Inc. to Orthoscan, Inc. and our new product became the Orthoscan Mini C-arm.

The plan was to introduce the new Orthoscan Mini C-arm at the American Society for Surgery of the Hand (ASSH) meeting in October 2005. A month prior to the show we had the machine complete from the mechanical engineering standpoint. We were able to show a home page on the monitor which included a digital X-ray image, but not a live image produced from the Orthoscan itself. More R&D was needed before we could ship units, but the convention was a success. Hand surgeons loved the concept, and we came home with 120 solid leads. The market was clearly excited to have a new, state-of-the-art, orthopedic mini c-arm. We just had to get the manufacturing right.

The first problem was that the patented power supply that we paid 10% of the equity in the company for did not work. It functioned in the prototype but not in production, primarily because it would overheat. We went back to a high-voltage power supply that was oil-driven, similar to the old one that we had used in the Fluoroscan. It had to be redesigned, which significantly delayed the process. After numerous design failures - the oil-driven power supply leaked while in use - we abandoned both the original power supply and the flawed redesign and hired a new technician who solved the problem by developing a stable high-voltage power supply for the Orthoscan. We had given up 10% of equity in the company for nothing. 

Video engineering created a different type of delay. I was adamant that we present the Orthoscan image in high-definition, with our own proprietary circuit boards. It was a concept that was far advanced from what competitors were doing. There had never been a high-definition real-time X-ray machine before.

I decided to produce our own proprietary video board that was Xilinx-based. This provided Orthoscan with several advantages, including an instant on/off feature that eliminated the need to wait an operating system to boot on and off. The Orthoscan was also fan-less, which greatly reduced the background noise. Both were groundbreaking innovations to the industry. 

We did introduce the first Orthoscan at the ASSH Hand Surgeon Show in October 2005. Orthoscan then followed up that debut with another big success at the Orthopedic Convention in March 2006. Our first units were finally produced after that show, in late 2006.