Cut into the lung, the breast, or the colon, and the usual landmarks disappear. Soft tissue shifts, and finding your way back to the exact spot that needs treatment becomes a real challenge. At Elucent Medical, Jason Pesterfield is working on a better way to find it.

Pesterfield joined Elucent Medical as President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director in 2023, bringing more than 30 years of medtech experience and a career spent around surgical navigation, lung cancer detection, and image-guided care. Before Elucent, he was president and CEO of Optellum, where he led the first FDA-cleared image-based AI biomarker for early lung cancer. Before that, he ran Veran Medical Technologies, a lung navigation company acquired by Olympus. Earlier still, he spent 17 years at Stryker, rising from marketing associate to global vice president and general manager of surgical navigation.

In other words, he has been thinking about how doctors find things for a long time.

Elucent's answer is EnVisio, a navigation system built around a tiny wireless implant called the SmartClip. Once placed, the clip emits a distinct electromagnetic signature that lets the system pinpoint its exact coordinates, guiding surgeons straight to the target and its margin. The approach is clinically valuable for breast cancer and other diseases in soft tissues that lack anatomic landmarks, such as the lung, lymph, and colon. 

The system was FDA-cleared in 2019 and has since been used in more than 7,000 breast cancer patients. Its next-generation platform, EnVisio X1, received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation in 2025 for minimally invasive surgery in cancer care, with the goal of helping surgeons reduce positive margins and avoid repeat surgeries.

"Working with Elucent allows me to continue to dedicate my career to making a difference in the lives of patients," Pesterfield said when he joined the company. “As President and CEO, I get to bring my experience in the industry, built over a lifetime, to help lead a team committed to surgical developments that will save lives.” 

A surgeon knows where the cancer is supposed to be. Elucent wants to make sure they can find it, reach it, and remove it with less guesswork along the way. Not quite a GPS, maybe. But inside soft tissue, it may be the next best thing.