Pitt’s Newest Startup is Bringing AI to the Operating Room
When asked if it would have been possible to create his startup company at a university other than Pitt, Parthasarathy Thirumala pauses for just a moment before answering, “No.”
Thirumala, Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the UPMC Center of Clinical Neurophysiology, has focused the research side of his career on problems that clinicians, like himself, encounter in the operating room related to intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IONM), enabling real-time interventions that can mitigate brain injury during surgery and post-surgical recovery.
In no other place, he said, would he have access to the voluminous clinical data needed to train an AI algorithm for detecting ischemia (low blood flow) to the brain than at one of the world’s largest academic medical centers.
And few places would enable him to collaborate with an informatics and AI expert so easily as his partnership with Shyam Visweswaran, who was recently appointed as the UPMC Endowed Chair in Biomedical Informatics within the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Pitt School of Medicine.
Throw in an expanding Pitt innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem that has provided funding, training, and networking opportunities to accelerate on the path from the lab to market, and Thirumala is convinced that the launch of his company, READE.ai, couldn’t have happened as efficiently anywhere else.
A Dangerous Gap in Surgical Monitoring
Around 2017, Thirumala and his colleague, associate professor Jeffrey Balzer, began focusing on an unmet need for brain monitoring in the approximately 3.5 million surgeries conducted nationwide that have an elevated risk of cerebral ischemia. In most instances, brain monitoring is not done. Where electroencephalographic (EEG) approaches are available and used for brain monitoring, they require highly trained experts to monitor readouts continuously – an arduous and expensive task.
If an ischemic event is missed, the results can be catastrophic, ranging from stroke to death, that cost the healthcare system an estimated $30 billion annually, according to READE.ai
“I realized that for this field to move forward, there has to be a better way of processing information,” Thirumala said. “That’s when I met Dr. Visweswaran and asked if he could help.”
Visweswaran has been an active collaborator at Pitt, promoting informatics and AI projects across medical specialties. And he is no stranger to innovation commercialization, having co-founded another company. He serves as the chief medical officer of another.
In 2019, their collaboration received support from the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, a joint effort between Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University and UPMC to mine health care data to drive innovation.
To better understand the pain points of their potential users and customers, they participated in the NSF I-Corps regional and national commercialization programs. Here they interviewed dozens of stakeholders – surgeons, anesthesiologists, equipment manufacturers – to assist them in creating a value proposition for their offering.
They learned that surgeons wanted brain monitoring for higher-risk surgeries, but ensuring enough trained technicians to monitor the data was a hurdle.
“There is a lot of turnover for OR staff,” Thirumala said. “We designed our solution, which can act as an expert to support clinicians during surgery.”
Leaning Into the Pitt Innovation Support Ecosystem
The next step for Thirumala and Visweswaran was to develop a regulatory strategy. They applied to the Commercialization Gap Fund, operated by the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) for funding to keep their innovation moving toward the market.
The Commercialization Gap Fund awards grants of up to $75,000 to projects with strong commercial potential that have developed proof-of-concept data. The funding supports key technical or market de-risking studies. Participants also receive consulting support from the OIE.
Thirumala credited Dan Broderick, director of the New Ventures team at the OIE, with guiding them through the development of their commercial value proposition; Paul Petrovich, director of new ventures, for assisting with grant applications; and Colleen Cassidy, director of innovation funding and program management, and licensing manager Tara Brandstad, for helping them understand the intricacies of the process.
With the Gap Fund proceeds, they hired a regulatory consultant to help them prepare for clinical trials. They have raised more than $600,000 from friends and family and are working towards a seed financing round of $2-3 million to advance through the clinical trial process.
Thirumala said he anticipates the first customers for their platform will be neuromonitoring service providers, who can add their monitoring program to their offerings to hospitals.
While their initial target market is carotid surgery, Thirumala said he envisions cardiovascular and eventually all surgical categories to follow. He also envisions expanding the platform from the OR to other settings, such as the emergency room, intensive care unit, or even ambulances.
Because it’s a software as a service, it can also be used across different hardware and be used in tandem with other applications.
If you are a Pitt innovator with an innovation that may have commercial potential, don’t hesitate to submit your discovery to the Office of Innovation and explore OIE’s commercialization education and funding programs.