AI-powered cardiac imaging company HeartFlow sued its competitor Cleerly this week, claiming the company infringed on its patents and misused proprietary technology to build a competing platform.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in a federal court in Texas, called the alleged infringement “one of the most egregious examples of piracy in the medical technology industry.” Cleerly is pushing back.
Heartflow was founded in 2010 by a bioengineer and vascular surgeon duo from Stanford University. The Silicon Valley-based company makes AI tools that analyze cardiac CT scans and assess how coronary blockages impact blood flow without invasive procedures.
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Cardiologist James Min established Cleerly in 2017. The startup also applies AI to cardiac CT images, focusing on quantifying plaque and assessing a patient’s long-term risk of heart disease.
Before founding Cleerly, Min worked as a consultant to Heartflow from 2012 to 2017 — the company’s “most formative years,” according to the complaint.
“After gaining intimate access to Heartflow’s revolutionary cardiovascular diagnostic technology, trade secrets, and confidential business information—and while still bound by his contractual obligations to Heartflow—Dr. Min, without informing his colleagues at Heartflow, incorporated Cleerly and launched a competing enterprise built upon Heartflow’s pioneering innovations,” the lawsuit read.
Heartflow alleges that Cleerly’s products infringe six of its patents — all of which cover methods for analyzing cardiac scans, including segmenting coronary arteries, modeling plaque and vessel structure and estimating blood flow characteristics.
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In a statement sent to MedCity News, Min said that he is confident in the originality of Cleerly’s technology.
“Cleerly has published landmark clinical science that has redefined how cardiovascular disease is understood and treated, which has formed the basis of our novel technologies that provide physicians with actionable insights into their patients’ heart health,” Min’s statement read.
Heartflow is seeking damages and injunction — which could mean financial penalties for past use of the technology and potentially a court order blocking Cleerly from using or selling certain tools.
The lawsuit could mark an early but potentially category-defining legal fight in the cardiac AI space.
The combination of AI and cardiac imaging sits at the center of high-volume, high-reimbursement workflows — coronary CT angiography alone is performed in millions of patients annually across the country and is quickly expanding as a first-line test for suspected coronary artery disease.
Concurrently, cardiac imaging and the related diagnostic procedures represent a multi-billion-dollar market. Diagnostic imaging is one of the largest categories of the nation’s healthcare spending, with imaging consistently ranking among the highest-volume and highest-cost physician services.
This makes any AI tool that influences cardiac diagnosis or downstream procedures highly valuable — and highly contested.
Photo: Just_Super, Getty Images