MediView XR

A surgeon looks at the patient and sees the tumor.

Not on a monitor across the room. Not in a stack of CT slices remembered from this morning. The tumor is right there, glowing in 3D, layered under the skin where it actually lives - bone, vessels, soft tissue, all of it. A thin line of light tracks the needle as it moves. The surgeon never breaks eye contact with the body in front of them.

This is a real procedure, run on real hardware, cleared by a real regulator. The company that built it is MediView XR, a 54-person outfit in Cleveland, Ohio. They make augmented-reality systems that give clinicians something the marketing copy calls "X-ray vision" - a phrase that should make a compliance officer wince, except the FDA signed off on it.

Modern medicine asks doctors to operate with their eyes in the wrong place.

Consider how a needle biopsy actually works. A scan is taken. The physician studies it, builds a mental model of where the lesion sits, then turns to the patient and tries to reproduce that model by feel. The imaging lives on one screen. The patient lives on the table. The doctor's attention ping-pongs between the two, doing geometry in their head the entire time.

It works often enough. It also fails in the ways you would expect when a human is asked to mentally fuse a flat image with a three-dimensional body. Missed targets. Repeat passes. Extra radiation. The polite industry term is "operator-dependent," which is a graceful way of saying the outcome depends on how good your spatial imagination happens to be that day.

MediView's founders looked at that gap - between where the image is and where the patient is - and decided it was not a fact of life. It was a user-interface problem. And user-interface problems, unlike physiology, can be redesigned.

Start with hospital patents, not a hackathon.

MediView was founded in 2017 by John W. Black and Adam E. Rakestraw, built on intellectual property - including issued patents - developed at and licensed from the Cleveland Clinic. That origin matters. Most augmented-reality startups begin with a clever demo and go looking for a problem. MediView began with a problem the Cleveland Clinic had already been chewing on, and patents to match.

Mina Fahim, now CEO and President, arrived with the kind of resume that medical-device boards like to see: years at Medtronic as a principal research and development engineer, plus stints touching cardiovascular, radiology, and orthopedic products. He studied biomedical engineering and technology management. The bet the team made was specific and unfashionable for its moment: that augmented reality, then mostly a consumer novelty chasing games and filters, had exactly one application where the value was obvious and the willingness to pay was real - guiding a physician's hands inside a body they cannot see into.

It was, in 2017, a contrarian read. Augmented reality was supposed to be about shopping and entertainment. MediView pointed it at the one room where getting the overlay wrong has consequences measured in human outcomes, not refund requests.

Two systems. One idea: put the scan where the patient is.

MediView sells two things, and they share a spine. Both take imaging that traditionally lives on a screen and anchor it, in three dimensions, onto the actual body on the table.

The technical achievement worth pausing on is the FDA clearance itself. XR90's 510(k) was the first granted to an augmented-reality device that fuses live imaging with 3D XR visualization for use during a procedure. Plenty of AR medical tools show you a model. XR90 was cleared to show you the live, moving truth, mid-operation. That is a different and much harder category.

The cap table reads like a hospital directory.

A skeptic's first question about any medical-AR pitch is fair: does anyone serious actually back this? Look at who wrote checks. The October 2025 Series A - $24 million - was led by GE HealthCare, one of the largest imaging companies on earth. Joining were the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, Edge Ventures (the investment arm of Emplify Health), and the JobsOhio Growth Capital Fund.

When two of the most respected hospital systems in the country put money into a startup that licensed its founding patents from one of them, the usual venture skepticism gets harder to sustain. These are not tourists in med-tech. They run the operating rooms the product is meant to enter.

Then there is the clinical record. The first worldwide case using the FDA-cleared XR90 was performed at NewYork-Presbyterian / Weill Cornell Medicine. A multicenter study is now under way to validate the system for soft tissue biopsy - the unglamorous, rigorous work of proving the thing helps, across more than one site, with more than one operator. Partnerships round it out: GE HealthCare on imaging, Microsoft on the mixed-reality hardware underneath.

Simplify, democratize, inform.

MediView states its mission plainly: to advance healthcare delivery with intuitive visualization, seamless collaboration, and evidence-based insights. The vision compresses to three verbs - simplify, democratize, inform. The democratize part is the one worth lingering on, because it is doing real work.

If a procedure's success depends heavily on the operator's spatial skill, then the best outcomes cluster around the most experienced physicians at the biggest centers. Make the anatomy visible, in place, to anyone wearing the headset, and you start to flatten that curve. The newer interventionalist at the regional hospital gets to see what the veteran at the academic center sees. That is what "democratize" means here: not cheaper, but more evenly good.

The bet was that "flying blind" would sound dated.

Procedures are moving in one direction: smaller incisions, more imaging, more precision asked of human hands. Every trend in interventional medicine increases the distance between what the doctor needs to see and what the naked eye can. That distance is exactly the space MediView built a company to fill. The more the field moves toward the minimally invasive, the more a system that makes the invisible visible looks less like a gadget and more like infrastructure.

There are real questions left. Adoption in hospitals is slow by design. Reimbursement for new procedural technology is its own long campaign. Headset hardware keeps changing underneath everyone building on it. MediView is past the demo and into the unglamorous middle - the studies, the installs, the second and third hospital. None of that is guaranteed to work. But the company has the two things that make the middle survivable: a clearance competitors do not have, and a cap table that runs the rooms it needs to enter.

The surgeon looks at the patient and sees the tumor.

Return to where this started. The same room, the same needle, the same lesion that used to hide under skin and behind a clinician's memory of a scan. Only now the scan is not a memory and not across the room. It is on the patient, in three dimensions, with a line of light pointing the way in.

MediView did not invent the procedure. It moved the information. The doctor's eyes stay where they should have been all along - on the body in front of them. That is a small change in geometry and, if the studies hold, a large change in who gets a good outcome and who does not. Cleveland, of all places, is quietly trying to make "flying blind" a phrase nobody in the OR remembers using.