Voices of Healthcare · #5
Chris Mansi
Co-founder and CEO
Viz.ai
Chris Mansi is a neurosurgeon and co-founder and chief executive of Viz.ai, whose software reads a scan for a time-critical finding, such as a large-vessel stroke, and alerts the specialist who can treat it. He came to Stanford from British neurosurgery to learn how to scale a business and found his company in a biodesign project.
Choosing Neurosurgery
He grew up in Newcastle, England, where his grandmother encouraged him toward medicine. At Cambridge he fell in love with neuroscience and found he wanted to intervene through surgery, not only understand the brain.
Starting Companies During Residency
During his neurosurgery residency in London, England, he started medical and surgical education companies, partly to support himself. A later, more successful company showed him he lacked the business fundamentals to scale, so he came to Stanford for an MBA.
Spotting the Delay in Stroke Care
In the Stanford Biodesign program, working on vein thrombosis, he saw how long it takes to get a patient with a time-critical condition to the right specialist. With each minute of a stroke, two million brain cells die, yet median time to treatment at a comprehensive stroke center runs to hours.
Building Viz.ai
He launched Viz.ai from that work. A brain CT goes to the cloud when the scan finishes, an algorithm reads it within minutes, and the surgical team gets an alert on their phones. In February 2018 the FDA granted its ContaCT software a De Novo authorization, creating a new class for computer-aided triage software. The company had submitted a retrospective study of 300 CT images checked against two neuroradiologists, plus real-world evidence that the software could notify a neurovascular specialist sooner when a blockage was suspected. Viz.ai also sends nurses and disease specialists to help hospitals fit the alerts into their workflow.
By 2024 Viz.ai was in 1,500 hospitals, used by 45,000 providers, touching about one patient every ten seconds, and covering more than 16 conditions.
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