To celebrate 10 years of Axial3D, the company CEO Roger Johnston, shares personal insights into how this innovative, leading AI-powered 3D medical imaging company has got to where it is now…
Axial3D was founded to make personalised, patient-specific care scalable and accessible. Now celebrating our 10-year anniversary, we’re proud of how far we’ve come — and even more excited about where we’re headed. The company began with a simple but powerful idea: to solve the challenge surgeons face when interpreting complex 2D scans by creating a fast, accurate, and automated way to convert DICOM data into 3D insights.
As our technology evolved, we saw how transformative it could be for medical device companies — enabling them to accelerate R&D, clinical validation, device customisation, and surgeon training. With early support from Northern Ireland’s innovation ecosystem and global strategic partners, we’ve grown into a trusted provider for some of the world’s most innovative MedTech companies and healthcare systems.
Today, our proprietary AI algorithms generate highly accurate 3D models faster and more consistently than manual methods, helping our partners improve outcomes, streamline workflows, and scale personalised care for every patient, everywhere.
As CEO of Axial3D, my role is to guide the company’s strategic direction and ensure we’re delivering real value to our core customers — MedTech companies and healthcare institutions. I’m focused on scaling our AI-powered 3D imaging solutions to help these companies accelerate innovation, support surgeons more effectively, and bring personalised care into everyday clinical practice.
What truly drives me — and all of us at Axial3D — is the patient at the end of every case. It’s easy to talk about technology, automation, and scalability, but at the heart of everything we do is a real person waiting for care that’s safer, faster, and more precise. By making advanced 3D medical imaging accessible and reliable, we’re helping our partners deliver better outcomes, one patient at a time. That’s the “why” behind our work — and it’s what keeps us relentlessly focused on precision, impact, and empathy.
Axial3D is headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with team members across the United Kingdom, North America, and Europe. The company was founded by Daniel Crawford, who began with a vision during his time at the University of Glasgow: to make patient-specific care more accessible through advanced imaging and 3D technology. Northern Ireland proved to be the ideal place to bring that vision to life — offering access to world-class engineering talent, AI expertise, and a thriving innovation ecosystem.
Now, ten years on, that early vision has grown into a global platform powering patient-specific workflows for leading medical device companies and hospitals around the world. As we celebrate a decade of innovation, Belfast remains our home — and the foundation for our next chapter in scaling personalised care. Axial3D delivers AI-powered software and services that seamlessly transform medical imaging into precise, actionable 3D models.
Our offerings include:
- Axial3D’s AXCEL™ is an AI-powered software platform built to scale patient-specific surgical planning. It rapidly transforms DICOM imaging into accurate, clinically usable 3D anatomical data—automating key steps like image acquisition, segmentation, landmarking, analysis, device selection or design, and surgical plan approval. The result: fewer bottlenecks, reduced backlogs, and faster delivery of personalised care. With AXCEL, MedTech companies can achieve precision at scale and get devices to patients sooner.
- Axial3D INSIGHT™ is a secure, cloud-based service that gives medical device companies and surgeons instant access to patient-specific 3D models—without the need for large upfront investments. Users simply upload DICOM files, which are processed by Axial3D using AI-generated segmentations and rigorous quality standards. The result: highly accurate 3D digital or printed models. With built-in quality checks, rapid turnaround times, an intuitive interface, and seamless workflow integration, INSIGHT delivers fast, actionable 3D data to support device planning and development—while giving surgeons the confidence to plan procedures with precision.
- 3D printed and digital anatomical models – Used by MedTech companies for device development, testing, training, and clinical validation — as well as by hospitals and surgeons for preoperative planning and patient education.
Axial3D is at the forefront of innovation because we’re solving two of the biggest barriers to personalised care — time and scalability. Traditional 3D segmentation is slow, manual, and inconsistent. Over the past 10 years, we’ve transformed that process by building proprietary AI algorithms, backed by millions of anonymised medical images, to deliver high-quality, patient-specific models at speed and at scale. Our technology is protected by multiple patents, and we’ve secured FDA clearances that validate the safety, reliability, and clinical accuracy of our approach.
What started as a bold idea a decade ago has become a trusted platform used by leading MedTech companies and healthcare systems worldwide. We’ve built a platform that supports scalable customisation, drives clinical impact, and powers the next generation of medical devices. This foundation of regulatory rigor and real-world data enables us to help our partners accelerate design cycles, get devices to patients faster, and better support the surgeons who rely on them. With automation, consistency, and clinical-grade quality at the core of our platform, Axial3D is setting a new standard for personalised care — and we’re just getting started.
We are currently engaged in multiple collaborations with leading medical device companies, including our existing partnership with GE HealthCare, to embed our technology into their workflows — from clinical planning and device development to robotics and surgical customisation. We’re also expanding our AXCEL segmentation engine into new anatomical areas and enhancing access to our services through the INSIGHT™ platform, tailored specifically for MedTech.
As more companies adopt personalised strategies, Axial3D is positioning itself as the platform behind scalable customisation — helping our partners bring precision care to life at scale. Looking ahead, the next decade is about deepening those partnerships, expanding globally, and continuing to lead with innovation. From real-time automation to predictive modelling and integrated surgical planning, we’re building the tools MedTech needs to drive the next gen of personalised care — faster, smarter, and more accessible than ever before.
We believe the future of healthcare is personalised, and we want to be the partner that helps make that future possible. For medical device companies, the opportunity to scale personalisation is here — to better support surgeons, accelerate innovation, and ultimately improve outcomes for every patient. If you’re exploring how to bring this next chapter of care to life, we’d love to work with you.
