There is one acute shortage of radiologists worldwide, which means it’s more difficult for medical teams to perform imaging studies. As a result, more than 200 companies have emerged to create applications that use artificial intelligence to automate different parts of the radiology process. CARPLa radiology marketplace that counts the Singapore government as a customer, is focused on making it easier for healthcare providers to access and use these apps.
The San Francisco-based startup announced today that it has raised $6 million led by Stellaris Venture Partners. The round also included participation from angel investors from Novo Holdings, Leapfrog PE, Bain & Co., Boston Consulting Group, United HealthGroup and others. CARPL will use the capital to hire in North America and continue to build its technology stack.
Companies including AiDoc, Qure.ai. Lunit, Avicenna, Gleamer and AZmed are all working on AI-based technology for radiology and have has created over 700 FDA-approved applications to date, but it is difficult for healthcare providers to select the most appropriate ones for their needs and then integrate them into their radiology workflows. This means slower adoption, despite a shortage of radiologists.
CARPL uses a DEV-D framework to help radiology teams discover (D), Explore (E) and Validate (V) applications from its AI marketplace so they can then develop (D) them. So far, it has onboarded more than 50 AI developers with 100 applications, which CARPL says makes it the largest AI marketplace in terms of AI applications offered to customers. In addition to the Government of Singapore, CARPL’s client base also includes Massachusetts General Hospital, Radiology Partners, University Hospitals, I-MED Radiology, Albert Einstein Hospital and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
The company was founded in 2021 by Dr. Vidur Mahajan, a physician who also holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and has over 12 years of experience in the diagnostics industry. CARPL’s leadership team also includes Chief Medical Officer Dr. Vasanth Venugopal, CTO Rohit Takhar and COO Dhruv Sahai.
Prior to launching CARPL, Dr. Mahajan grew revenue 10x to $20 million in 10 years in his family business Mahajan Imaging, a provider of radiology services. His father, Dr. Harsh Mahajan, a radiologist, helped him conceive CARPL while validating and developing AI at Mahajan Imaging.
Dr Mahajan (junior) tells TechCrunch about his experience in his family business which included writing research papers and giving presentations and published in leading journals such as The Lancet.
“The more I worked with leading AI companies around the world, the more I realized that AI solutions were being built in niches, and the users of those solutions had to use multiple AI solutions on different combinations of body parts and diseases.” He says. For example, there are different AI applications for stroke, chest tuberculosis, lung cancer and prostate cancer. Dr. Mahajan saw that this delayed the adoption of these apps because healthcare providers had difficulty selecting and integrating apps.
Companies building AI applications must first go through healthcare providers to test and validate their software before integrating it with user interfaces and data channels. Executing a consolidation can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 and take 6 to 18 months. Dr Mahajan says that CARPL solves these problems by providing a single user interface (a universal AI viewer), a single data channel and a single procurement system to providers that not only facilitates the selection of AI applications, but also faster validation and development.
One use case involves CARPL’s Radiology Partners customers, which perform 50 million radiology exams annually through 3,500 radiologists in the US. It was technically difficult and time-consuming for the company to evaluate the performance of the AI algorithm from four vendors. They used CARPL to test the vendors on 20,000 patients, which Dr. Mahajan said cut their pilot time from a year to a few months and a day for a single vendor.
CARPL is also used by University Hospitals in Cleveland, which is affiliated with Case Western Reserve University, to build, validate and deploy artificial intelligence in their clinical practice. X-rays of patients with possible fractures are sent to CARPL and a third-party AL algorithm from AZmed determines whether a feature is actually present or not. This means radiologists can work more efficiently and patents receive care faster.
CARPL is post-revenue and monetizes through a model where customers pay for access to its platform to test third-party AI algorithms on their own data in a secure environment behind their firewalls. They can also run third-party AI algorithms in a clinical development setting.
The startup’s competitors include Blackford Analysis, DeepC and Incepto, but Dr. Mahajan says CARPL differentiates itself by being the only platform with validation and monitoring capabilities built into radiologists’ PACS workstations, which they use to analyze images. CARPL’s mission is to make the radiologist’s work 10x faster by providing an entire AI ecosystem. It’s starting with radiology because it “has the most vibrant ecosystem of AI applications,” says Dr. Mahajan, but plans to expand to other subspecialties such as digital pathology, oncology, cardiology, dermatology, ophthalmology and gastroenterology.
In a statement, Stellaris Venture Partners partner Alok Goyal said: “The volume of imaging scans is growing steadily at 9% year-over-year, yet the number of radiologists joining the workforce is only 1.8%. Bridging this demand gap is a critical challenge for healthcare providers, and we believe artificial intelligence will be key. CARPL’s comprehensive platform, designed to test, develop and monitor radiological AI applications, is poised to empower healthcare providers by seamlessly integrating AI into their clinical workflows.”
