The past couple of years have witnessed the formation of more than a dozen companies focused on taking a portfolio of very early stage medical devices to the next level. With good ideas and connections, device industry executives, as an alternative to joining operating companies are increasingly joining incubators where they can keep their hands in device company creation over a number of projects. Whether you call these companies incubators or accelerators, they all share the goal of filling a gap between technology and company creation, and funding. Accelerators can help early stage concepts get the hearing they normally might not get either in the venture capital community, which is prepared to take on clinical and market risk but not technological risk, or large companies, which are focused on maintaining existing businesses. In fact, for certain kinds of broadly-enabling platform technologies that cut across clinical specialties, the incubator/accelerator model makes a lot of sense.

Market growth in image-guided surgery will come, in part, from new technologies that can guide surgeons in soft tissue. Pathfinder Therapeutics Inc. thinks its IGS platform, built on 15 years of academic R&D by pioneers in IGS, fits the bill. The first application is for the large, unmet need in treating liver cancer. Currently, just 20% of patients are eligible for open liver surgery, the current gold standard treatment.

Vivant Medical Inc. has developed minimally invasive microwave ablation technology for solid tumors. Vivant believes that its technology---which includes a novel ring-shaped probe--will be faster, safer and more effective than radiofrequency ablation.

The success of BrainLAB, a leader in radiotherapy and image-guided surgery, has been built on two strengths: technological innovation, particularly in software designed specifically for medical applications, and a series of alliances with large device partners that gave it the clout to get its products to market. Though BrainLAB is, on some level, a capital equipment company, it remains, culturally, a software provider, with the aggressive, innovative, entrepreneurial spirit associated with software companies. The company's next major challenge: getting off to a quick start in orthopedics, which could be image-guided surgery's biggest market to date.