The 2026 Shark Tank Winners Rethinking Surgical Imaging

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What if the C-arm you already own could show you the entire pelvis — in real time, with less radiation? The winners of the 2026 AHF Shark Tank believe it can, and they built the system to prove it.

Dr. Dean Cole, an orthopedic trauma surgeon with roughly 40 patents and designs licensed across the industry, and Scott Banks, PhD, who has spent nearly four decades quantifying how joints actually move under fluoroscopy across more than 200 published papers, join Joe Schwab to tell the story of Orthopedic Driven Imaging (ODI) — the company born from a 2022 cold call — and SODI, their FDA-cleared imaging platform that retrofits the GE OEC C-arms already sitting in an estimated 22,000 operating rooms.

The conversation traces both founders' paths: Dean's trauma training under Jeff Mast and a lifetime of problem-solving inherited from a space-program father; Scott's route from pre-med engineer to Mako-era implant design and a career asking how knees and hips really move. Together they explain why surgical planning and postoperative confirmation have advanced dramatically while the middle of the operation stayed fuzzy — and what a full-field-of-view detector changes for anterior approach hip replacement: pelvis alignment from a video camera in the collimator, fewer scout shots, less radiation, and femoral offset you can actually measure.

They also get practical about adoption: what they'd say to the surgeon who trusts their current imaging, why anterior hip and spine come first while the joint-kinematics vision matures, and what they're looking for from early-adopter surgeons (orthodriven.com).

⏱️ Chapters:
00:00 Introduction: the AHF Shark Tank winners
01:35 Pitching surgeons live at AHF 2026
04:33 Dean Cole: trauma, Jeff Mast, and 40 patents
07:12 Scott Banks: an engineer's toolbox for medicine
09:02 What we still can't see about joint motion
11:31 The 2022 phone call that started ODI
15:33 A founding team built by serendipity
18:13 Two decades of C-arms, nav, and robotics
21:30 What robotics does well — and the ill-defined target
26:56 Full field of view, less radiation, same workflow
30:55 Retrofitting the C-arm you already own
34:16 What early ODI cases taught Dean
36:11 Why anterior hip (and spine) come first
38:29 To the surgeon who trusts their current setup
40:09 Hip replacement five years from now
41:16 What ODI wants from early adopters
44:08 Taking risks late in a career
49:50 Advice for surgeon-innovators in training
53:06 What they hope patients never have to know

Listen to the AHF Podcast on your preferred platform:
Buzzsprout: https://ahfpodcast.buzzsprout.com
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ahf-podcast/id1749521487
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5CrGJyvRiQFTCU3FFFVvHc
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/ahf-podcast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@anteriorhipfoundation
Homepage: https://anteriorhipfoundation.com
Guest company: https://orthodriven.com

This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only.

The content discussed does not constitute medical advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional judgment. Clinicians should rely on their own training, experience, and clinical decision-making when applying information from this discussion.

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