Avandra Imaging Emerges from Stealth to Solve a Last-Mile Problem in Medical Research

A brand new startup emerged from stealth on Tuesday on the HLTH convention in Las Vegas. The Irvine, California-based firm, named Avandra Imaging, is a federated community for de-identified imaging information.

Avandra’s important aim is to make it simpler for well being programs, biopharma corporations and AI builders to entry imaging information that may assist advance their analysis, defined CEO and founder Ryan Tarzy.

“The problem now we have proper now’s a final mile downside. We have now spent the final 20 years and God is aware of what number of {dollars} on digitizing medical information and transferring into the EHR. However proper now, the medical level of fact of imaging is what’s arguably essentially the most useful information. And it’s simply not broadly obtainable — particularly in a big sufficient, various sufficient dataset for analysis,” he remarked.

Tarzy stated he usually hears medical researchers and AI builders lament the truth that they will’t get their arms on imaging information.

For instance, he identified that there have been some corporations attending HLTH searching for to construct instruments for earlier identification of Alzheimer’s or to higher handle the effectiveness of Alzheimer’s remedy. To construct these sorts of instruments, researchers want mind imaging, not simply EHR information, Tarzy famous.

“The issue is that no person is aware of the place these photos are, although there are thousands and thousands of sufferers. It’s a needle in a haystack downside, and so they don’t even know what haystack to look in to search out the needle,” he declared.

To handle this downside, Avandra has constructed a de-identified information community wherein researchers can extra simply find the imaging they’re searching for. Accessing this information will assist researchers with issues like medical trial design and algorithms coaching, Tarzy stated.

To him, Avandra has two important rivals: Gradient Well being and Segmed.

“They don’t have a federated mannequin, and so they don’t have the community that now we have,” he said.

A federated community ensures that healthcare information stays with its unique homeowners — permitting hospitals and different suppliers to take care of management and adjust to privateness legal guidelines whereas nonetheless facilitating collaborative analysis, Tarzy defined.

As for Avandra’s enterprise mannequin, the startup operates on a market mannequin.

“It’s license plus skilled companies and we income share again to the contributor,” Tarzy stated.

Avandra already has some clients, however it’s ready to reveal what number of and to disclose their names, he famous. He did say that the corporate is worthwhile and has 40 workers.

Along with rising from stealth mode, Avandra additionally introduced a partnership with Datavant, a well being information platform that connects and de-identifies affected person information throughout organizations. Datavant’s community contains greater than 70,000 hospitals and clinics.

Datavant makes use of tokenization software program, which converts affected person identifiers, reminiscent of names or medical report numbers, into distinctive, encrypted tokens. This permits researchers to match information throughout datasets with out revealing private data.

For the brand new partnership, Datavant constructed customized know-how to tokenize Avandra’s imaging information, Tarzy identified. This may assist researchers match up a affected person’s imaging information with their different medical information with out ever revealing the individual’s id, he famous.

Photograph: Darunechka, Getty Pictures