COMPANY

Name: Voxel Healthcare

Legal Name: Voxel Healthcare LLC

Location: Los Angeles, California

Founded: 2017

Founder(s): Natasha Leporé, Sinchai Tsao, Niharika Gajawelli 

Website: http://www.voxelhealthcare.com/

Social Media Following: 33 Likes on Facebook, 2 Followers on Twitter

INDUSTRY – Diagnostic/Medical Imaging Technology

Size: $3.6B (Global) (2015) (Source: Allied Market Research)

Projections: $5.3B at a CAGR of 5.6% by 2022 (Source: Allied Market Research)

Introduction

Focusing on medical imaging technology, the Los Angeles-based company is the developer behind ClickBrain – an MR clinical decision support tool for pediatrics. Crafted with technology developed at the CIBORG Lab at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the product assists clinicians in the diagnosis of childhood disorders. Voxel leverages recent developments in machine learning and deep learning to devise these measurements promptly.

The Product

ClickBrain, the clinical support software, provides radiologists and clinicians quantitative pediatric brain MRI measurements. After comparing them with a large database of healthy, normal subjects, it provides reproducible quantitative assessments of each brain region. Initially aimed at a pediatric audience, the product claims to be especially useful to patients who have to deal with the time-consuming assessment post an MRI and the lack of specialized pediatric neuroradiologists and viable clinical support tools. The tool thus helps increase interpretation efficiency, facilitate uniform interpretation and most importantly, enable earlier diagnosis and therapeutic interventions.

To assist physicians in avoiding unnecessary radiation doses, Voxel has also developed a clinical decision support software – ClickBrain RT. It relies on cloud computing-based deep learning technologies to automatically delineate key structures in the brain. A machine learning algorithm is trained to predict volumetric changes due to treatment-related radiation.

Origin and Founding Team

Voxel’s team comprises Natasha Leporé, CTO, who is also an Associate Professor of Research Radiology at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and co-director of the CIBORG Lab.

CEO Sinchai Tsao has a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering, Master’s in Electrical Engineering & Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. After obtaining his Ph.D., he was a scientific software engineer for Malaria Diagnostics, followed by a stint at Ultrasound Diagnostics in Bellevue, WA.

Niharika Gajawelli, who currently serves as COO, has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering.

Performance and Trends

In 2017, the National Cancer Institute awarded Voxel Healthcare and their partner, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, a non-dilutive $225,000 Phase I SBIR grant entitled ‘Machine-Learning based Radiation Toxicity Mitigation in Pediatric Brain Cancer’. This move raised the startup’s total non-dilutive funding to $500k and provided seed funding for them to extend ClickBrain’s application in radiation therapy as well.