Startup Develops Imaging AI Marketplace Platform
With more than 200 companies building applications using artificial intelligence to automate parts of radiologists’ workflow, a startup company called CARPL has created an imaging AI marketplace platform to enable healthcare providers to access, assess and integrate these radiology AI applications through a single user interface, data channel and procurement system.
The company has received $6 million in a seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from strategic angel investors from Novo Holdings, Leapfrog PE, Bain & Co, Boston Consulting Group, UnitedHealth Group among others.
CARPL’s platform is used by organizations such as the Singapore Government, Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston), Radiology Partners (Los Angeles), University Hospitals (Cleveland), I-MED Radiology (Australia), Albert Einstein Hospital (São Paulo), and Clinton Health Access Initiative.
The University Hospitals Department of Radiology has signed a multi-year strategic agreement with CARPL.ai as the AI validation and deployment partner for the UH RadiCLE AI Lab, RadiCLE – UH Radiology A.I. and Diagnostic Innovation Collaborative. “We are excited to have CARPL.ai as a platform for executing our projects in developing, validating, integrating and assessing radiology AI solutions at UH RadiCLE,” said Leonardo Kayat Bittencourt, M.D., Ph.D., director of RadiCLE and vice-chair of innovation at UH Radiology, in a statement.
The company explains the challenge it is addressing this way: “With more than 700 F.D.A.-approved AI applications, healthcare providers grapple with navigating the complex landscape of niche AI solutions. The daunting task involves determining the best AI solution for them and their patients, then seamlessly integrating it in the radiologists' workflows. This complexity has resulted in the sluggish pace of AI adoption in healthcare.”
CARPL’s technology platform addresses this need using its proprietary DEV-D framework allowing healthcare providers to first Discover (D), Explore (E) and Validate (V) AI applications from CARPL’s AI marketplace, and subsequently Deploy (D) the most appropriate application across their clinical workflows.
The company said its universal AI viewer serves as a single user interface for radiologists, enabling them to accept, reject or refine AI outputs, which can subsequently be used to improve the performance of the AI itself.
Operational since 2021, CARPL was founded by Vidur Mahajan, a physician with an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business who has spent more than 12 years in the diagnostics industry.
Vijay Rao, M.D., senior vice president of enterprise imaging at Jefferson Health and a past-president of the Radiology Society of North America, is on the company’s advisory team.
“Over the past two years, we have onboarded more than 50 AI developers having 100+ AI applications, which made us the largest AI marketplace in terms of number of AI applications offered to customers. We are proud that some of the largest healthcare enterprises in the world have vetted our technology and trust us to be their partner in their AI and automation journeys.” said Mahajan in a statement. “We are democratizing radiology in the same way that automation and robotics revolutionized lab medicine, where a single pathologist signs out thousands of tests each day. We envision a future where CARPL creates ‘super-radiologists’ — AI-enabled radiologists who are 10 times more productive than traditional radiologists.”
