Zantek
Over the years, I have spent a lot of time interacting with advanced scientific equipment. It was part of my life growing up. My father, Imran Chaudhry, started a medical surplus company, Tekyard, after moving to the U.S. from Pakistan. Growing up in medical equipment warehouses, I had childhood exposure to medical and laboratory devices, from popping packaging peanuts with a laser to cutting hot dogs with an electrosurgical unit.
While building my reactor, I encountered many companies that deal in surplus lab equipment, like Tekyard. Surplus companies generally deal in bulk and do not possess the skill set or tools required to test these advanced items. Items with plenty of value would end up on the recycle list, often because they required special testing, and without that testing, the value dropped substantially. With experience I acquired working on my fusor and similar projects, I began picking up this recycled equipment from Tekyard and testing it for fun, and one day I decided to list a vacuum pump I had been working on. An item that was supposed to be recycled went from a value of $0 to its sold price of $1000.
I started Zantek in the garage with a startup grant from Tekyard in the form of some vacuum pumps that were to be recycled or auctioned and a lot of support in how to set up a business. I performed testing / refurbishment, provided calibration information, and listed the pumps on eBay. I quickly found my niche: selling to early-career professors who were interested in quality-assured, used equipment.
In the summer after junior year, I hired two of my friends, Andrew He and Kevin Huang, and a sales person in Pakistan, Shoukat Mumtaz, (replace this section with "I hired three geniuses") and we focused on vacuum pumps and PCR equipment, earning ~$100k over that summer, selling to major universities, including Rice Bioengineering, Harvard Mechanical Engneering, and MIT Physics. We ended up dealing in many different types of scientific equipment, acquiring untested higher-end lab equipment, generally from surplus companies and lab liquidations, testing and calibrating this equipment, potentially performing repairs, and then re-marketing this equipment for use in laboratories. In 2020, we transitioned to medical equipment, hiring a Certified Biomedical Equipment Technician. We grew to ~30 full-time employees globally and ~$8M annual revenue by the time of acquisition by AA Medical.
You can see some sample products below.
Polair
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the XPRIZE Foundation launched the Next-Gen Mask Challenge to design a better face mask, and I joined a team of incoming and current Johns Hopkins University students to tackle it. We developed the Polair mask, a modular mask with interchangeable bodies (from cloth to a clear N95), allowing personalization and customizability for particular use cases. We won the $250k Future Forward Award, one of two runner-up prizes, putting us in the top three out of 992 entrants. I stayed with the team afterwards to lead our patenting efforts, resulting in the publication of our application. Sadly, we ended up abandoning the application after some back and forth with the patent office, and a lack of interest in continuing the project.
Pool Patent
In high school, I filed a provisional patent for an automated pool chemical maintenance device. I have considered applying for a full patent, but at this point, I have too many ongoing projects to justify the cost. Our home has a pool, and we maintain it ourselves. Over the years, I've noticed that we put in a lot of time and effort in performing mundane tasks to keep the pool clean/chemically balanced. I began to investigate automated systems, but found them to often be quite overpriced, generally due to the presence of expensive sensors. Rather than purchase such a system, I began designing my own, relying on the standard pool test chemicals and much less advanced/costly sensors plus a better digital interface. I will not be giving more details at present, as there is a possibility that I pursue this in the future.
Hackathons
What is a hackathon?
A hackathon is a fast-paced competition where you try to build some sort of functional prototype over a short span of time. Often, this entails conducting the entire engineering design process and beyond, from identifying a problem to solve, conducting market research, ideating, building a prototype, crafting a pitch, and even constructing a business plan. Hackathons also often have tracks/themes, for example a hackathon may have the theme of sustainability, with tracks in reducing carbon emissions and improving food production. I am a frequent healthcare hackathon competitor.
Columbia BMES Hacking Health (Feb. 8-9, 2024)
At Columbia, I worked with Aiesha Chaudhry (we're actually not related), Ojas Chahal, Rhyan Schweyk, and Ryan Bose-Roy in team HeartED. We decided to tackle a serious problem, emergency department (ED) overcrowding, using machine learning. We focused on chest pain patients because EDs often have a tough time deciding whether to discharge, admit for observation, or immediately test patients with chest pain since the pain could be caused by a serious heart condition. There is a scoring scale called the HEART score invented to help make these decisions, but a lot of providers don't use it in practice because it takes time to dig through patient records for the information, and the ED is pretty fast-paced (emergency is in the name).
We proposed an automated method for HEART score calculation based on interfacing with the electronic health record (EHR) system and using large-language models (LLMs) to extract the relevant information to feed the calculator. We won the data science track (top 4 team out of 19 entrants).
Yale CBIT Healthcare Hack (Jan. 24-26, 2024)
At Yale, I worked with Mac Singer, Samip Kafle, Ryan Bose-Roy, Alaadin Ibrahimy, Abdulaziz Bakkar, Eric Pan, Amit Koikkarah Aji, and Jeff Hall in team visionairy. We came up with a very innovative idea thanks to Mac's insights as an ophthalmology resident. He noticed that the early warning signs of glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy, the leading causes of irreversible blindness are often missed in optometry appointments. There are AI models that are very good at detecting these signs, but they haven't been FDA-approved, and if they have been, then they have struggled to make it into the clinical workflow. We set out to fix that.
We proposed a new type of PACS (picture archiving and communication system, i.e. medical imaging management system) image viewer with an integrated AI marketplace to: 1) improve patient outcomes with better glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy detection; 2) enable optometry clinics to increase revenue by billing to medical instead of vision insurance upon diagnosing these; 3) enable AI model companies to integrate into existing PACS clinical workflow; and 4) enable AI model developers to connect with providers to launch studies on the way to FDA approval. We won the $5000 grand prize (top team out of 15 entrants).
Rutgers Health Hack (Nov. 3-5, 2023)
At Rutgers, I worked with Noam Rotenberg, Nidhi Salian, Fatima Kahbi, Nina Punwani Eran Doni, Jonathon Laberov, Emily Schiller, and AJ Rose. Speaking with Dr. Vamsee Chaguturu, we identified a big problem in psychiatry: there are seldom quantitative metrics. Even simple measurements, such as the speed at which the patient is speaking (rapidity of speech) are measured subjectively (e.g. rapid, moderate, slow). We set out to create a tool that treats speech as a biomarker, extracting relevant features identified in the literature (from the speed in words per minute, to particular frequency components predictive of PTSD). We created a live demo in our pitch for the judges, and we won the $5000 grand prize (top team out of 16 entrants).
Stealth Mode Startup
I am currently working on a startup in the field of healthcare AI. We have been validating the idea with health systems, and there is a lot of interest. We are currently building a minimal viable product and raising money to support this effort (though we do have a small-scale demo that has been well-received). After we get some more funding and get further in development, I will put more details out. I guess this doesn't mean much without the details, but this could be pretty big (based on preliminary discussions with development groups, health systems, and experienced entrepreneurs/investors in the field), like billions of dollars market size big.
Hopefully more details coming soon (big meetings in December and January).