Dr. Jacques Kpodonu is a board-certified cardiac surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, with deep expertise in structural heart disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, aortic disease, transcatheter and hybrid cardiac procedures, and minimally invasive cardiac surgery. He is an NIH-funded surgeon-scientist whose work sits at the intersection of cardiac surgery, robotics, artificial intelligence, data science, and global cardiovascular health. He co-directs the Cardiovascular Artificial Intelligence Network, serves as a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, and has held editorial and leadership roles across The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, CTSNet Global, global health, workforce diversity, data innovation, and cardiac surgery committees. His work spans AI-driven robotic surgery, cardiac surgery capacity building in low- and middle-income countries, rheumatic heart disease, structural heart interventions, and hybrid operating-room innovation. At CardioVis, Dr. Kpodonu anchors the clinical strategy and gives the company direct access to real cardiac surgery workflows, surgeon feedback, validation pathways, academic medical centers, and strategic medtech relationships needed to bring surgical AI into cardiac care.
CardioVis
Surgical intelligence platform for cardiac surgery — AI copilot embedded into robotic systems for real-time intraoperative guidance
About
Team (4)
Dr. Phat K. Huynh leads technical delivery, AI infrastructure and model validation at CardioVis. He is an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University and Founder and Director of the 25+ member PASSIO Laboratory. He manages 12+ engineers with backgrounds from Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Bosch, and has led 6 government and industry contracts totaling $3M+, including funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and Intuitive Surgical. His work spans surgical AI, medical imaging, cardiovascular risk modeling, and digital twins. At CardioVis, he leads the technical roadmap across surgical video ingestion, annotation, model training, deployment and real-time OR copilot infrastructure.
Heath Rutledge-Jukes leads product development, frontend, UI/UX, and distribution strategy at CardioVis. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30 founder, TEDx speaker, and MD candidate at Washington University School of Medicine with full-tuition scholarship support. He previously co-founded King of the Curve, scaling medical education products to 2M+ downloads across apps and platforms while managing a 20+ person cross-functional team across engineering, content, growth, and operations. He has built and launched products across mobile, web, AI tutoring, clinical workflow tools, and medical education, with consulting and product work for Apple, Microsoft, Medtronic, Eko, Volastra, MGH, Paige, Brigham and Women’s, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and other healthcare AI teams. For CardioVis, he turns complex surgical AI outputs into surgeon-facing workflows for video review, anatomy overlays, risk prompts, coaching feedback, and intraoperative decision support while building distribution pathways across hospitals, training programs, surgical education networks, and strategic healthcare partners to drive adoption of CardioVis.
Dang Nguyen leads operations, commercialization, and clinical data strategy at CardioVis. He is an AI/ML research fellow across Harvard, Stanford and MIT with 120+ publications (25,000+ citations, h-index of 34). He previously served as a clinical research manager at Massachusetts General Hospital and as a World Health Organization Principal Investigator. He co-founded a deep-tech neurotechnology startup that raised $800K+, generated 4,000 waitlist sign-ups, and secured $180K in pre-orders at $0 CAC in one month. For CardioVis, he supports clinical partnerships, low-cost surgical data pipelines and validation studies, including access to clinical studies involving 500+ patients in Vietnam at near-zero data collection cost. He also founded a nonprofit that raised $350K+ to fund pediatric heart surgeries, expanding CardioVis’s cardiovascular clinical network and global implementation capacity.