An outstanding medical imaging software company that utilizes artificial intelligence technology for magnetic resonance imaging interpretation: Bot Image

The medical industry is a complicated segment that includes a number of interconnected operations. It could be harmful if any step in this process fails. Additionally, unlike any other field, healthcare deals with the most valuable resource: human life! With proper imaging solutions, we can assess nearly every critical illness and receive detailed analytics for the same. Medical imaging is the procedure used to create a visual picture of the many internal organs of the body for in-depth clinical evaluation. It aids in deciding the required medical intervention.

Globally many companies deliver excellent medical imaging solutions, but Bot Image stands out from the rest. Bot Image created an artificial intelligence software that assists physicians in the interpretation of prostate MRI. Bot Image’s ProstatIDTM scored a hat trick with the FDA last fall when it became the ONLY such software that has been FDA-cleared for detection, diagnosis, and screening of prostate cancer using fast, inexpensive MRI scanning protocol called bi-parametric MRI (bpMRI). The service operates in the real-time environment meaning that after it receives the MRI study, it confirms proper inputs, applies its diagnostic routine, and returns results back to append to the sender and unique patient ID in less than five minutes (before and after below w/cancer lesion in red).

In conversation with Dr. Randall Jones, CEO and Founder of Bot Image

Q. What was the motivation behind starting Bot Image?

I was extremely motivated to Start Bot Image Inc. because of the obvious growing unmet clinical need to improve prostate cancer (PCa) detection, diagnosis and screening. As a MRI physicist and Antenna Engineer, I was the founder and CEO of another medical device company, ScanMed LLC which became a world-leader in MRI antenna (coil) development and repair. One of its leading products was, and is, a dedicated prostate/pelvic MRI coil that significantly improves the diagnostic image quality of the MRI from those anatomical regions. While demonstrating this coil, it became quite obvious that the typical radiologist lacked training and specialization sufficient to read or interpret MRI with a high degree of accuracy. Multiple peer-reviewed journals supported this observation. So, with one in eight men contracting PCa during their lifetime, this presented a tremendous opportunity to effect positive change in men’s healthcare via improving early and accurate detection of PCa using low-cost, highly accessible, virtually risk-free prostate cancer Screening as well as diagnostic assistance.

Q. Have there been any setbacks in your journey so far?

Setbacks are part of every journey when dealing with both a start-up as well as medical device development but I have been through this numerous times in my career which helped reduce the number of undesirable surprises. Expected challenges were raising capital and prosecuting our case to gain FDA certification. Regarding the former, the spate of fraud and deception from Silicon Valley start-ups and the more recent bank failures hasn’t helped create confidence in the venture capital world, but there are honest brokers out here, such as Bot Image, that have an actual product that has proven its merits to be life changing, less expensive and easily scalable.

Q. Tell us about conception and development of ProstatID.

I was attending a meeting of the AdMeTech foundation in 2017 and speaking with an acquaintance from the National Institutes of Health at lunch time regarding how poorly radiologist were doing in interpreting prostate cancer from MRI. In short, I observed with Dr. Choyke that this problem clearly could be solved with artificial intelligence and as the CEO of a medical device company; I was going to jump in and do just that. I was pleasantly surprised when he then informed me that his team had been working for a number of years on developing the concept and had recently published a paper1. My company soon went to work improving and commercializing this concept. We collected over 2000 patient data sets from multiple medical facilities using MRI and guided biopsy pathology data from the top three MRI manufacturers with which to train the algorithm. Bot Image developed, trained, tested through two clinical trials involving 25 US radiologists, the ProstatID software, and demonstrated an outstanding Standalone PCa detection of 93.6/100 AUROC (area under the sensitivity/specificity curve) as compared to the top score of 74.6/100 of those participating radiologists – some with over 20 years of experience.

Q. How do you make sure that your services are affordable?

We have ensured that our Medical Device software service is affordable first by ensuring that it is MRI system agnostic and that it costs far less than a contrast MRI which is the current standard of care. Secondly, we have priced it such that the cost to the provider is easily offset by the improved accuracy and throughput (efficient work-flow) it provides. 

Q. What does innovation mean to you and how do you deliver it through your services?

I believe that the role of innovation is to bring about improvements in processes, services, and outcomes. We have demonstrated that a 20-minute non-contrast MRI supplemented with our AI can significantly improve diagnostic performance (AUROC), shorten exam and interpretation times, and better serve the patient and physician in guiding the patient through their journey with accurate visual 3D mapping of all suspicious lesions indicated by ProstatID.

Q. What are the greatest challenges of being in your space? How are you tackling them?

Our greatest challenge is overcoming the staunch resistance to change by the healthcare system – from physicians through hospital c-suite and the insurance industry. We have proven that we have a true healthcare industry disruptive technology through clinical studies as well as through academic papers2, PR, and educational pieces. These speak collectively about its capabilities and positive effect on saving the industry hundreds of millions annually from ineffective and outdated procedures such as performing DREs (51% effective) and non-image-guided biopsies (miss 30% of cancers).

Q. How do you market your services?

We market our services via web presence, attendance to medical conventions, and journals as mentioned. One of the key ingredients to our “marketing” plans is education – to the healthcare decision makers, physicians, and public. The term ‘AI’ is often misused in product marketing and dilutes public opinion about effectiveness of AI, therefore, I want to inform the readers accordingly. Unlike many products that claim to be AI but are merely hard-coded language that perform routine tasks, ProstatID uses true AI, meaning that the algorithm employs deep learning and training using large amounts of data with specific “ground truth” in order to perform the heavy lifting of actual cancer detection.

More recently, our focus is employing effective MRI screening for PCa; and thanks to the serendipitous timing of a recent study published in the NEJM3 that “active surveillance” and watching and waiting can be a more viable course of action than the aggressive treatments taking place, the timing of our marketing couldn’t be better.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

Bot Image is currently working with several MRI systems and agnostic Advanced Visualization and Artificial Intelligence platform providers who are attaching our “dockerized” application to their systems installed throughout the US, Europe and elsewhere. Other disruptive products are in development.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

Bot Image has a bright future and is started on an impressive trajectory with its unique FDA-cleared product useful for not only prostate cancer detection but for screening as well. Considering the preponderance of this disease, this first tool can provide a game-changing improvement to screening with its 93.6 AUROC performance. Every man should have such a screen periodically after the age of 50 and earlier if they have family history.

References:

1. Nathan Lay, et. al., Peter L. Choyke, Peter Pinto, Bradford J. Wood, and Ronald M. Summers, Detection of prostate cancer in multiparametric MRI using random forest with instance weighting, Journal of Medical Imaging 4(2), 024506 (Apr–Jun 2017).
2. Anderson, MD*, et. al., Randall W. Jones, PhD, MBA, Mukesh Harisinghani, MD*, Improving Prostate Cancer Detection with MRI: A Multi-Reader, Multi-Case Study Using Computer-Aided Detection (CAD), Academic Radiology 2022, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acra.2022.09.009
3. Hamdy, Donovan, Lane, Metcalfe, et. al., Fifteen-year Outcomes after Monitoring, Surgery, or Radiotherapy for Prostate Cancer, NEJM, March 11, 2023. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2214122

Meet the leader behind the success of Bot Image

The CEO and Founder, Dr. Randall W. Jones, after serving 11 years in the USAF during the cold-war, graduated with honors from Texas A&M University (PhD-EE, MBA). Dr. Jones is a prolific inventor (22 US and foreign patents), entrepreneur, and successful business creator and manager (grew and sold ScanMed after attaining world leading position of MRI coil repair) and repetitive industry disruptor.

“ProstatID^™ was trained from thousands of proprietary MR image sets, radiologist interpretations, segmented prostate gland image sets, pathology laboratory results, correlation data, and first-pass AI interpretations to aid in the early diagnosis of prostate cancer.”