Market & Competition

Target Customers

Our primary customers are physicians working at local dental clinics and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) that serve underprivileged populations. These doctors are often the first to discover potentially malignant oral lesions during routine exams, positioning them as a major adoption channel for intraoral cancer screening tools.

Customer Priorities

Some factors that are highly important for these customers are:

• Workflow Efficiency - Most physicians will prefer that novel screening solutions integrate seamlessly into existing routines without wasting too much time or money, factors that are crucial in the fast-paced, lucrative medical industry.
• Diagnostic Accuracy - Dentists will be more inclined to adopt an imaging technology if it has shown a superior degree of accuracy in experimental trials to ensure that their patients won’t be misdiagnosed and suffer avoidable medical consequences.
• Patient Welfare - Ensuring the best outcomes for patients remains a top priority.

Buyer vs Customer

However, while dental physicians are OralVision’s main customers, the buyers are usually clinical administrators, who are mainly interested in maximizing profits and limiting diagnostic errors to avoid costly lawsuits.

Thus, in order to encourage clinical administration to purchase OralVision for their clinics and persuade doctors to adopt the device in lieu of existing alternatives, our company will pursue multi-segment marketing, creating specialized advertising campaigns for our target segments based on their individual priorities and interests.

Market Opportunity

The opportunity size for an oral cancer screening device is significant, as the global market for intraoral imaging is valued at approximately $535 million USD.

Currently, the oral cancer diagnostics industry is built around large dental imaging hardware manufacturers, with dentists and oncologists acting as the main channels for diffusion. Despite the rise of digital dentistry in the past decade, most competitors haven’t incorporated new AI technologies in their devices yet. With OralVision’s use of novel deep learning methods for diagnostics, our company has the potential to completely revolutionize the intraoral diagnostics market.

Competition

OralVision’s most significant competitors in the oral diagnostics market are the VELScope Vx and the ViziLite PRO Oral Lesion Screening System. These devices utilize blue light to excite fluorophore molecules in the mucous membrane, resulting in abnormal oral tissue emitting a distinct fluorescence.

While these existing solutions have been successful in improving lesion visibility, they cannot accurately differentiate between benign and malignant growths and ultimately rely on the physician’s naked eye to provide a specific diagnosis. Moreover, both the VELScope Vx and the ViziLite PRO can cost over $2,000 upfront, with necessary accessories bringing that price even higher.

This exorbitant pricing alienates many clinics in underprivileged areas from accessing essential intraoral diagnostic technology, contributing to disproportionately high oral cavity cancer rates.

Our Advantage

While OralVision and its competitors all have the same goal of assisting physicians with oral cancer diagnosis, our innovation’s novel software and cost-effective design make it revolutionary in the diagnostics market.

Instead of simply illuminating abnormal tissue, OralVision takes multiple photos of a patient’s oral cavity and feeds them into a comprehensive federated neural network that our company developed and trained. Our innovation has the capability to provide highly accurate clinical diagnoses and iteratively refine model parameters based on aggregated HIPAA-compliant patient data, giving us a significant edge over market competitors that haven’t even considered integrating machine learning with intraoral diagnostics yet.

In addition, OralVision utilizes cost-effective hardware, enabling our company to produce it at a relatively lower marginal cost and sell it at a highly competitive price that’s more accessible to underserved communities. The only notable disadvantage that OralVision has in comparison with existing solutions is the fact that the device is quite bulky and not ergonomically optimized. However, we have plans to make the device frame more streamlined to maximize patient comfort in future prototypes.