Nvidia’s NVentures backs $150M round for medical AI startup Aidoc

Aidoc Medical Ltd., a startup with an artificial intelligence platform that helps doctors diagnose patients faster, has secured $150 million in funding.

Goldman Sachs led the Series C round. Aidoc stated in its funding announcement today that Nvidia Corp.’s NVentures startup investment arm, General Catalyst and SoftBank Investment Advisors chipped in as well. The software maker’s total outside funding now exceeds $500 million.

When doctors review a medical image such as an X-ray, they must not only diagnose the patient’s condition but also determine how urgently care should be provided. Aidoc provides a platform called aiOS that speeds up the process. It also streamlines certain related tasks such as managing patient data.

The software is powered by a custom foundation model called the Clinical AI Reasoning Engine, or CARE for short. According to Aidoc, clinical-grade AI models were historically trained to process a single type of medical data. CARE, in contrast, can analyze medical images, electronic health results, patient vitals and lab results.

In January, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the model for diagnostic tasks across 11 disease indicators. Aidoc earlier secured regulatory approval for three other indicators. 

The company says that CARE has a specificity of up to 99.7%, which corresponds to an under 1% chance of false positives. According to Aidoc, that’s about an order of magnitude better than some competing models. The algorithm’s mean specificity, a measure of diagnosis accuracy, is 98% across the 11 disease indicators that the FDA approved in January.

Aidoc says that CARE’s accuracy enables its aiOS platform to spot incidentals. Those are potential disease indicators that doctors weren’t necessarily expecting to find in a medical scan. After identifying an anomaly, aiOS prioritizes it based on its estimated severity. The software brings urgent issues to the attention of medical professionals via a mobile app.

Aidoc’s platform also eases a number of other tasks. There’s a spreadsheet-based data management interface that can be used to track the current status of patients. Furthermore, aiOS can automatically identify patients who may qualify to participate in clinical trials.

Aidoc says that its platform has been installed in nearly 2,000 hospitals worldwide. The medical teams at those facilities use it to process data about more than 60 million patients per year.

Aidoc will use its newly raised capital to expand international adoption of its aiOS platform. In addition, the company plans to enhance the CARE model that underpins the software by equipping it with the ability to detect more disease indicators. Aidoc is also working on a feature that will automatically draft clinical reports based on data from medical images.

Photo: Pixabay