Skip to content

Chesco teacher's radiation software goes commercial

Backed by Bentley and Mimeya, physics teacher-turned-Penn student Mike Kijewski's GrayCAD software designs digital radiation protection for X-ray techs

    by Joseph N. DiStefano
    Published 
Gamma Basics' GrayCAD, a computer-aided design program developed by Downingtown East physics teacher-turned-University of Pennsylvania medical-physics graduate and Wharton MBA candidate Mike Kijewski, is already making money from its first medical-device and hospital clients, a year after the Bentley brothers' Paoli-based Bentley Software committed $125,000 in "angel" capital, Kijewski tells me.

By the mid-2000s, Kijewski was ready to move on from teaching. Realizing "medical school wasn't for me," he says he went to work for a medical-equipment firm. His first job: to calculate how thick the shielding for an X-ray installation should be. "I said, 'Where's the software?' They said they didn't have any." He left, and enrolled in Penn's graduate school in late 2008. He was starting to have ideas.

X-rays are commonplace, yet to hear Kijewski tell it, the industry's practices for building radiation shields to protect staff are almost haphazard: "You're desigining a radiation oncology facility. A physicist checks 15 locations for worst-case scenarios, and bases the design on those 15. Each set of calculations may require four sub-calculations, or 10. But basically you're putting your finger in the air."

GrayCAD "does the same calculations, but with the software you get a lot more results. We built in the different distances, the different bulding materials." A foot away from where a physicist may have found acceptable levels, the software "will find a spot where the dosage is higher than acceptable. And it can take 40 hours to do the calculations by hand. We go through projects in 20 minutes." 

UPDATED: How to build a better system? Kijewski posted an online ad. Philadelphia software developer Eric Pancoast, a partner at Mimeya, a Philadelphia IT consulting firm, responded, and the group, including Mimeya partners Bill Fenstermaker and Jeff Ronis, "met Mike at Sugar Mom's in Old City, and agreed to work, for free, to build the beta" version, Fenstermaker told me. In exchange for giving up precious billing hours, "we wanted to co-found the company. So that's what we did." They spent the next "year-ish" building GrayCAD to where it could stand up before the Linac vendors' site-planning group and potential users..
Kijewski began shopping their prototype radiation-shielding calculation software to Siemens and other medical-device makers. "We had some interest," he said, and that convinced  the group it was time to start looking for investors.
A friend worked for Bentley, which makes construction software for a long list of builder clients. CEO Greg Bentley was scheduled to speak at the Penn campus in early 2010. "I sent him an email, he invited me, we had breakfast. I went to his office to have lunch." In April the Bentley brothers who own the firm agreed to invest.

Kijewski took his master's in medical physics in June 2010, then enrolled in Wharton for his MBA. "I spent the summer working on the prototype." Gamma soon landed its first customer, a medical-equipment vendor, who started using beta versions in January, and the commercial version in June. A hospital in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, started using the software this week.

"It's a pretty niche, high-tech industry," Kijewski says. He's packing for the American Association of Physicists in Medicine conference in Vancouver, Canada this weekend. "We'll be peddling our software, making some connections."
    JN
    Joseph N. DiStefano