Better Know A Barcelona Startup: Mint Labs

Health has been on the agenda for some time and it’s shaping up to be a year for some heavy disruption in the sector. Understandably, health startups present an opportunity to reduce costs for medicals systems that often use antiquated methods for diagnosing and treating diseases. With the rise of collaboration tools, doctors across the world can more easily access and share medical data hence increasing the chances of an early diagnosis and a successful treatment. There are still many obstacles to tackle from legislative and investor perspectives, but health startups are moving in the right direction.

Paulo Rodrigues, PhD in neuroimaging analysis and co-founder of Mint Labs, informs us that 1/3 of us will be affected by brain disease (Did someone say pain point?). In today’s world, Neuroscientists use brain-imaging techniques to view inside the human brain without invasive neurosurgery and without painful procedures. There are several accepted, safe-imaging techniques in hospitals and research facilities throughout the world such as DMRI, FMRI, which can all be ultimately unpleasant for anyone with claustrophobic tendencies. More importantly these techniques that have been around for years but still clinical scales are being used, taking a lot of time for diagnosis which can lead to misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment

For the past 7 years, Paulo and his team at Mint Labs have been working on a remote advanced medical image analysis and visualization platform. Without getting too technical, they help doctors provide a better and quicker diagnostic and treatment for patients with brain diseases thus identifying the problem earlier and increasing the chances of survival. Vesna, the other co-founder is also a very experienced scientist, a Marie Curie fellow working on exploring neuroimaging for Multiple Sclerosis, and currently visiting Harvard to take this technology further. Mint Labs = Lifesaver.

Utilizing advanced image analysis algorithms, Mint Labs creates complex 3D maps of the patient’s brain – “like Google Maps for the brain”. The founding team, who all hold PhDs in Neuroscience, have developed a technology that delivers their clients an accurate, efficient and cost effective tool.

This promising Barcelona startup believes that hospitals, medical centers and clinicians can work smarter by getting more from their scanning equipment and exploiting emergent technology, with new interaction paradigms in order to enhance and revolutionize clinical workflow. Researchers and doctors can collaborate on data analysis, share tools and results without the need of a local complex computational infrastructure.

Currently housed in the Wayra program in Barcelona, Mint Labs has been included in the top 50 of the CODE_n competition for ‘driving the code revolution’ and has been attracting a lot of attention from the medical sphere.

I’m going to get my brain scanned so ill let you know how it goes!