Medical devices & diagnostics · Emergency neuroimaging
Caire Health
An AI tool built by three medical-student brothers to read head CT scans for brain bleeds in the emergency room. Three peer-reviewed studies back its accuracy. No FDA clearance has been found on the public record, four years after a co-founder said one was six months away.
A pandemic project on a shut-down campus
In March 2020, Duke University sent its students home. Anmol Warman, then a rising junior biology major, and his older brother Pranav Warman, who had just finished a double major in computer science and biology, went back to Tampa, where their family lived, and started reading about a testing problem. Nasal swab tests for COVID-19 were missing up to a third of true cases. Supplies were short and results took days.
The brothers wondered whether a computer could be taught to spot the disease on chest CT scans instead. Over spring break they pulled roughly 900 CT images from 338 patients off public radiology sites, then asked radiologists at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa to mark the suspicious areas. They trained a neural network on the set and tested it on scans it had never seen. It flagged 98% of positive cases and correctly cleared 95% of people with similar-looking but unrelated lung damage.
“That’s probably one of the worst things in a pandemic,” Anmol Warman told Duke Today of the swab test’s blind spot. “You don’t want people thinking that they’re safe and actually not being safe.”
The problem that stuck
The COVID tool never reached a clinic. But the brothers, joined by a third sibling, Roshan Warman, kept the underlying question: could the same kind of model help a doctor make a faster call in the emergency room. They landed on intracranial hemorrhage, a bleed inside the skull that needs treatment within minutes to hours to avoid death or permanent damage, and that depends on a non-contrast CT scan being read correctly under time pressure, often by an emergency physician before a radiologist is available.
Caire Health incorporated in 2021 and was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch. According to Dealroom and Tracxn, the company raised $125,000 in seed funding around its YC participation, its only reported round on file.
Three brothers, one product
Pranav Warman entered Duke’s medical school in the fall of 2020. Company listings identify Anmol Warman as chief executive. All three Warman brothers, along with a rotating set of radiology and emergency-medicine collaborators, are listed as authors on the company’s three published validation studies. The team is small: a 2026 GetLatka estimate puts headcount at around three people.
At Y Combinator’s August 2021 demo day, TechCrunch described Caire Health’s pitch as AI meant to “diagnose brain bleeds in seconds,” and reported that Anmol Warman said he expected FDA approval within six months and that the company was running trials with multiple hospitals.
What the studies show
Since that demo day, the Caire ICH system has been the subject of three peer-reviewed papers, all with Warman family members among the authors alongside outside radiologists and emergency physicians. A 2022 Cureus study of 532 scans found the tool improved radiologists’ accuracy by an average of 6.15 percentage points and their agreement with each other by 5.76 points. A 2023 World Neurosurgery paper, using a separate retrospective set of 510 scans, reported 98.05% accuracy, 97.52% sensitivity and 100% specificity for detecting a bleed. A 2024 Emergency Medicine Journal paper found emergency physicians using Caire ICH improved their accuracy by 6.20 percentage points, to a level statistically indistinguishable from a panel of general radiologists.
By 2025, the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium, a nonprofit that connects health technology companies to defense and biomedical research programs, listed Caire Health in its life sciences directory, describing the product as software that detects and classifies hemorrhage, segments lesions and ventricles, measures midline shift and flags fractures or hydrocephalus.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA clearance | No 510(k) or PMA filing found for Caire Health, Caire ICH, or Caire under any FDA device search as of Sep 22, 2026. Every FDA 510(k) matching the applicant name “Caire” belongs to Caire, Inc., an unrelated maker of portable oxygen concentrators. | Not found |
| 2021 approval timeline | At YC demo day, co-founder Anmol Warman said he expected FDA approval within six months. | Differs from record |
| World Neurosurgery, 2023 | Retrospective set of 510 non-contrast head CTs. Reported 98.05% accuracy, 97.52% sensitivity, 100% specificity for Caire ICH vR1 in detecting hemorrhage and subtype. | Peer-reviewed |
| Cureus, 2022 | 532 scans, three radiologists reading with and without the tool. Average accuracy up 6.15 points, sensitivity up 4.6 points, specificity up 10.62 points, inter-reader agreement up 5.76 points. | Peer-reviewed |
| Emergency Medicine Journal, 2024 | 532 scans, five board-certified emergency physicians. Accuracy with Caire ICH up 6.20 points on average, reaching a level not significantly different from a radiologist panel. | Peer-reviewed |
| Registered clinical trial | No trial for Caire Health or Caire ICH found in a clinical trial registry search. | Not found |
| Marketing claims | Company site states validation studies show sensitivity and specificity above 97% and a statistically significant 5%-plus improvement in ER physician and radiologist accuracy (p<0.05), and describes the platform as HIPAA compliant. | Company-stated |
| Funding on record | $125,000 seed round tied to Y Combinator Summer 2021, per Dealroom and Tracxn. A separate estimator, GetLatka, lists $0 in reported funding for the company. | Sources disagree |
| Revenue estimate | GetLatka estimates $330,000 in 2025 revenue, labeled by the site as an estimate, not a disclosed figure. | Unverified estimate |
Read plainly: the peer-reviewed numbers are consistently strong, but they come from studies where the company’s own founders are co-authors, run on retrospective data the company or its collaborators assembled, not from an independent clinical trial. No outside validation, no FDA record, and no confirmed institutional funding round have surfaced since the 2021 launch, even as the underlying science kept getting published.
What to watch
- Whether an FDA 510(k) or De Novo filing ever appears for Caire Health, five years after a co-founder said clearance was close.
- A validation study run by researchers with no Caire Health affiliation.
- Named hospital customers; none are disclosed on the current record.
- Any funding round beyond the original $125,000 Y Combinator check.
In their words
“That’s probably one of the worst things in a pandemic.”
Anmol Warman, co-founder, Duke Today, May 2020 · Independent
“You don’t want people thinking that they’re safe and actually not being safe.”
Anmol Warman, co-founder, Duke Today, May 2020 · Independent
“Could AI help us use all the testing options we have?”
Pranav Warman, co-founder, Duke Today, May 2020 · Independent
“But what’s really cool about our system is that it doesn’t just spit out a diagnosis.”
Anmol Warman, co-founder, Duke Today, May 2020 · Independent
“We know that testing is going to be extremely important, especially now that some epidemiologists are suggesting a second wave.”
Pranav Warman, co-founder, Duke Today, May 2020 · Independent
“We need to know who has the virus to prevent further spread.”
Pranav Warman, co-founder, Duke Today, May 2020 · Independent
“I’m proud of our students for taking the initiative to work on this.”
Guillermo Sapiro, Duke computer vision and medical imaging researcher, mentor to the team, Duke Today, May 2020 · Independent
“We believe that no emergency should have to wait.”
Caire Health, company website and Y Combinator profile · Company
Related companies
Sources
- Peer-reviewedUsing an artificial intelligence software improves emergency medicine physician intracranial haemorrhage detection to radiologist levels
- Peer-reviewedExternal Validation of an Artificial Intelligence Device for Intracranial Hemorrhage Detection
- Peer-reviewedDeep Learning System Boosts Radiologist Detection of Intracranial Hemorrhage
- Public recordFDA 510(k) database search, applicant “Caire”
- IndependentDuke Students Taught a Computer to Detect COVID-19 in Lung Scans
- IndependentHere are all the companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 demo day, part 1
- AggregatorCaire Health company profile
- AggregatorCaire Health company profile and funding
- AggregatorCaire Health revenue and team estimate
- AggregatorCaire Health company profile
- CompanyCaire Health, Semi-Autonomous Diagnostics for Emergent Care
- CompanyCaire Health website, Imaging Intelligence Immediately
- CompanyCaire Health profile
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
