Living in isolation and sharing a home office with her mother, a renowned radiologist, has given Shiva Suri a unique perspective on how radiologists work.
“I watched her work every day and she was wasting about seven to eight hours on boring workflow tasks,” Suri said. “Only 5% of the time was she limited in her radiology thinking skills, which was really sad.”
So Suri, then an engineer at big data analytics company Confluent, founded New Lantern, a startup that automates tedious radiology-related tasks such as 3D measurements during scans and report generation.
Suri (pictured below center) noticed that her mother's workday primarily revolved around two software systems. PACS, a digital library of medical images where doctors view scans. and reporting software that converts those images into actionable diagnoses.
Switching between tools felt unnecessarily cumbersome, so New Lantern consolidated these tools into one platform.
Eric Vishlier, general partner at Benchmark, said the company has considered other AI-powered radiology startups, but its primary focus is on image analysis. He passed on others in part because the technology is not yet ready to replace human radiologists.
It has been predicted for years that AI will make radiologists obsolete. However, the trade-off is that these experts are in short supply.
Rather than using AI to analyze images, Suri said AI can help with the tedious work, “giving doctors the ability to do something they enjoy and are good at, which is reading scans.” said.
New Lantern claims its software significantly increases the efficiency of radiologists, allowing them to complete twice as many cases in the same period of time.
“That’s why I was really excited,” Vishlia said.
On Wednesday, New Lantern announced it had raised $19 million in a Benchmark-led Series A.
New Lantern's goal is to replace and modernize the way radiologists work, not only with the help of AI but also by ensuring that all data is stored in the cloud.
According to Suri, some vendors of PACS (short for Picture Archiving and Communication System) are still hosted on-premises.
Current providers of PACS are GE Healthcare and Phillips. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Nuance dominates reporting software, but Rad AI, an AI-first company backed by Khosla Ventures, told TechCrunch that it's gaining significant market share.
But New Lantern has big plans to completely disrupt radiology software with its product.
“Twenty-five years ago, we [physical] Please send the film to PACS,” Suri said. “We want to see the biggest evolution in the market since PACS was invented.”
Suri declined to discuss his customers, but said some radiology clinics are already using the company's products.
One thing is clear: his mother is definitely a New Lantern fan.