Clinical brief
01Portfolio-grade before-and-afters. Patient photos never leave the phone.
For dentists, plastic surgeons, dermatologists, hair-transplant clinics, and tattoo artists who post to Instagram and do not want to ship patient photos to a cloud.
What this is
A capture-and-align tool that runs on the iPhone you already use. Portfolios, consultations, visual progress.
What this isn't
Not a medical device. Not a diagnostic aid. Not a system of record. Not a cloud anything.
Capture loop landing soon
Real-device capture of this use case ships once test users finish their first runs.
The pain
Even the slightest change of angle can completely distort an image and change the way a viewer sees the result of a treatment.
How Lign solves it
The features that line up for this exact use case.
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Detection runs on the Neural Engine, not on a server
Apple Vision handles face landmarks, body pose, animal pose, and Object Anchor instance segmentation entirely on the iPhone. There is no Lign cloud; nothing about a patient capture leaves the device while Lign is in the loop.
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Scoped Photos picker keeps you out of the camera roll
Lign reads patient photos through the iOS PhotosPicker, which grants access to the chosen images only. The forty-day Recently Deleted hold that catches practices using the default camera-roll workflow is sidestepped, because the photos never enter the roll in the first place.
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Manual mode and Object Anchor for the cases that need them
Mouth Corners for dental smile makeovers. Pupils for full-face dermatology. Body Pose for plastic-surgery healing. Object Anchor (tap an object on one photo, Vision finds it on the rest) for impressions and devices. Manual mode lets a clinician tap two points per photo when the auto-detection isn't right for that case.
The clinical before-and-after gallery is a documented conversion driver: 74.8% of consumers will not consider a practice without one, per RxPhoto’s industry stat. Mendel Bell at Touch MedSpa cites a jump from 45% to 90% close rate after adopting an aligned-portfolio tool. The gallery is sales infrastructure.
The compliance side cuts the other way. Trade publications across plastic surgery and aesthetic injectables are explicit that iCloud Photos, Dropbox, and Apple’s Recently Deleted album are not HIPAA-compliant places for patient photos. The default iPhone workflow (take photo on phone, photo auto-syncs to iCloud) is a documented compliance gap that 89% of plastic surgeons run anyway, because the alternative (DSLR plus retractors plus clinical imaging suite) is too slow chairside.
The clinical photography guides go further. As Optident’s photography guide puts it: “even the slightest change of angle can completely distort an image and change the way a viewer sees the result of a treatment.” That sentence summarizes why a misaligned gallery is worse than no gallery, and why the alignment problem is a clinical problem before it is a marketing one.
Lign is the phone-side capture-and-align tool that fits between those two realities. Photos enter through the scoped Photos picker, get aligned on the iPhone Neural Engine, and exit as portfolio-grade comparisons without ever touching iCloud or a Lign server.
Use it for dental smile makeovers, ortho braces-off reveals, plastic-surgery healing arcs, dermatology peels, hair-transplant grow-ins, and tattoo healed photos.
Lign is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, measure, or assess clinically. It aligns photos for portfolios, consultations, and patient-facing visualization. That is the scope. That is the pitch.
Landmarks used
- Pupils (face cases)
- Mouth corners (dental, smile makeover)
- Body pose (plastic surgery)
- Animal eyes (veterinary practices)
- Object Anchor (dental impressions, scars)
- Manual landmark (anything else)
See it line up
Two ways to see what alignment buys you.
Drag the slider for the still comparison; scrub the flipbook for the motion. The frames here are stand-ins drawn from the in-app pet morph; the use-case capture lands with Phase 8.5.
About that one thing
Is this HIPAA?
Lign is not certified as a HIPAA Business Associate, and it is not marketed as a system of record. Photos are processed on-device using Apple Vision. There is no Lign server. That makes Lign compatible with practices that want to capture and align patient photos without auto-syncing them through iCloud (documented as not HIPAA-compliant) or Dropbox (also documented as not HIPAA-compliant). Your privacy officer governs the workflow around it; Lign is a tool inside that workflow, not a substitute for it.
Questions, answered.
- Is Lign HIPAA-compliant?
- Lign is not certified as a HIPAA Business Associate, and it isn't marketed as a system of record. What it does is process photos on-device with no upload and no Lign server. That makes it compatible with practices that want to capture and align patient photos without auto-syncing them through iCloud (which is documented as not HIPAA-compliant) or Dropbox (also documented as not HIPAA-compliant). Document your own workflow with your privacy officer.
- How is this different from RxPhoto, PhotoDoc, or Canfield Mirror?
- Those tools are EMR-bundled or station-bound, priced for full-practice deployment, and require account setup. Lign is a phone-side capture-and-align tool, sized for the parts of the workflow that happen on your iPhone, not the parts that go in the practice management system. Different scope, different price. See your local price in Lign on the in-app upgrade screen.
- Can hair-transplant clinics use this for patient self-shot monthly photos?
- Yes, and that is a strong fit. Turkey-based clinics post hundreds to thousands of patient grow-in galleries on Instagram. Patients self-shoot monthly photos under inconsistent bathroom lighting. Lign aligns them on the patient's phone before the photos come back to the clinic for posting. See the patient-side [hair transplant use case](/use-cases/hair-transplant).
Coming soon