Age: 39
Job Title: Chief Technology Officer, Aris MD
Why He’s Top 40: For being at the forefront of a technological revolution in medicine.
By the time kids were getting ready for kindergarten, Scott Edgar was already reading. “I taught myself to read so I could understand the error messages on the computer,” Edgar says. When other kids were simply learning how to play video games, Edgar was tearing apart the code and reprogramming the games to do new things.
Fast-forward three decades and Edgar is the chief technology officer of a company that, at a recent CES exhibition in Las Vegas, was called the “holy grail” for medical technology.
“The end goal is to help advance medicine,” says Edgar. “It’s a field [in Canada; it’s the opposite case in the United States] that’s very slow to adopt new technologies and is risk-averse.”
The company will be piloting several projects and then hopes to bring its made-in-Edmonton technology to the world. Aris MD could be a leader as Edmonton transitions towards a knowledge-based economy.
The technology allows medical experts the chance to see medical imaging in 3D of their patients. Instead of looking at a brain scan in slices, the brain can be rendered in 3D. A surgeon can look at a 3D visualization of a patient’s body before a surgery. As Edgar explains, we’re all different on the inside. So, surgical procedures are designed to offer leeway that a major artery might not be exactly where you’d think it would be. But, by visualizing patients, surgeons can test out what they need to do and take the least invasive routes.
This article appears in the November 2018 issue of Avenue Edmonton
