A Boston-based startup specializing in labeling medical images for artificial intelligence use has just raised $15 million in new financing, leaders announced Friday.
Private equity firm Matrix Partners led the Series A funding round, with contributions from several similar outfits. Centaur Labs’ model centers on a network of “tens of thousands” of medical students across 140 countries. Users jump on the company’s smartphone app DiagnosUs, competing with one another as they work to label X-ray, CT, MR, ultrasound and images in other specialties. Centaur said the app judges these users on their work, rewarding those who excel with cash prizes, while also collecting opinions on each case.
“AI learns like humans—by example—and to train an algorithm it takes thousands or even millions of examples. It is difficult to curate large medical datasets, and nearly impossible to source accurate labels from those with medical knowledge and specialized training,” Erik Duhaime, co-founder and CEO of Centaur Labs, said Sept. 3. “Our platform is built to support a wide range of specialized medical tasks, and to quickly scale to millions of labels.”
Duhaime and colleagues note that about 30% of the world’s data is now generated by radiology and other medical fields. But it is largely unstructured and poorly labeled. AI vendors require carefully curated sets of medical images and videos, and the success of their AI tools hinges upon accurate labeling.
Currently, medical students contribute more than 1 million opinions on the company’s application each week. Centaur is now providing annotation services for several startups and providers groups including Eko Health (which has created an AI-powered stethoscope) and Brigham and Women’s (using ultrasound for new AI tools).
Duhaime founded the firm back in 2017 while earning his PhD at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Tina Kapur, PhD, an assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and executive director of Image Guided Therapy at Brigham and Women's, is serving as advisor to the startup.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.