RedBrick AI, a health-tech AI platform, has announced a $4.6 million seed funding round to accelerate the development and adoption of artificial intelligence in clinical settings through rapid data annotation on medical imagery. Surge, Sequoia Capital India, and Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up program led the round, with participation from Y Combinator and angels.
Medical imagery is an important source of truth in clinical diagnosis, accounting for roughly 90% of all healthcare data. AI systems can significantly reduce time to diagnosis, increase clinician productivity by triaging high-importance cases, and serve as the first line of defense in understaffed clinical settings.
Researchers and healthcare institutions are increasingly investing in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to improve diagnostics, treatment, and patient care quality. AI in healthcare has the potential to transform patient care by increasing clinician productivity and automating clinical diagnosis. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 115 AI algorithms for use in medical settings in 2021 alone, an 83% increase from 2018.
However, until medical images are cleaned and expertly annotated, researchers cannot use them to train AI systems. Hundreds of annotated medical images and thousands of hours of annotation by clinicians are also required for training an AI system. Clinicians must rely on traditional and difficult-to-use clinical tools to perform annotations due to the complexity, size, and unique nature of medical images.
The tools developed by RedBrick AI address several challenges specific to medical data annotation, including the complexity of existing annotation tools, quality control, and machine learning integration. The platform’s specialized annotation tools are browser-based and intended to be used without prior training. In addition, RedBrick AI provides semi-automated tools for annotating complex 3D medical images.
RedBrick has a robust quality control process in place to ensure the quality of annotations, which are critical for obtaining regulator certification for AI algorithms. It entails efficient quality control workflows on the platform that can compile the opinions of multiple clinicians per annotation case, all while drastically reducing project management time.
CEO and co-founder Shivam Sharma and CTO and co-founder Derek Lukacs launched RedBrick AI in 2021. Shivam and Derek have previously collaborated on SpaceX’s Hyperloop technology and competed in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. Shivam has a background in aerospace engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan, while Derek has a Bachelors and Masters degree in aerospace engineering from the same institution.
