uSINE
Real-time AI navigation for spinal punctures — a GPS for the spine
2018–present · HiCura Medical
Product page (opens in a new tab)Business impact
- first-attempt success (palpation → uSINE)
- 66% → 92%
- first-attempt success, high-BMI patients (BMI > 30)
- 43% → 82%
- markets with regulatory approval — EU MDR · SG · MY · TH · IN
- EU + 4
- First-attempt failures cut from ~1 in 3 to fewer than 1 in 10 — patients spared repeat needle passes.
- In clinical use at 5 leading Singapore hospitals.
Problem
Spinal anaesthesia is traditionally a blind procedure: the clinician finds the right gap between two lumbar vertebrae by feeling the patient's back (manual palpation), then judges the needle's entry point and angle by touch alone. Roughly 1 in 3 first attempts fails — repeat punctures, complications, wasted clinical time. Ultrasound is the recommended remedy, but reading spinal ultrasound is genuinely difficult. uSINE is the AI guidance layer in between: it identifies spinal landmarks in real time and guides needle placement.
Approach
- Moves with the clinician: adoption drove the design — clinician interviews set the direction, the UI was co-designed with them and a professional UX team, and the tracking algorithm was fully redesigned, even under time and cost pressure, so clinicians could scan the way they already do.
- Engineered for the procedure room, not the lab: runs alongside the ultrasound machines hospitals already own, with deep algorithm optimization delivering real-time performance on standard off-the-shelf CPU laptops — lower cost, portable, nothing to replace, and nothing exotic to install or maintain.
- Built to be audited: extensive testing and validation — including clinical validation across 200+ patients — thorough documentation, and Git-based traceability that keeps every change auditable on the path to multi-market regulatory approval.
Tech stack
Real-time computer vision on off-the-shelf CPU laptops — OpenCV, Cython, ONNX, PyQt
My role
CTO & co-founder — led the full prototype-to-production rebuild across algorithms, backend, and UI.
