Company leader
James K. Min, MD
Founder and CEO
Cleerly
Min believes heart disease should be screened for the way breast and colon cancer are, by imaging the coronary arteries directly years before symptoms.
A Cardiologist Trained in Chicago
James K. Min is a board-certified cardiologist and the founder and chief executive of Cleerly, a company whose AI software measures plaque in the heart's arteries on CT scans. Before Cleerly he was one of the best-known researchers in cardiac CT imaging.
Min earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago and his medical degree at Temple University, then completed his internship, residency, and cardiovascular medicine fellowship at the University of Chicago Hospitals, according to his Cleerly biography.
Two Decades of Cardiac CT Research
Min became a professor of radiology and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and director of the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging at NewYork-Presbyterian. He has published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers and led large multicenter trials and registries of coronary CT angiography, including CONFIRM, PARADIGM, and ICONIC, and he ran a core lab for CT imaging in the ISCHEMIA trial.
He is a past president of the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography, which gave him its Gold Medal for lifetime achievement in 2017, and he was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography.
Leaving Weill Cornell to Found Cleerly
Min founded Cleerly in 2017. He told Cardiovascular Business that the plaque analysis his Cornell team did by hand worked, but would not scale. "We started to ask ourselves, 'Well, that's great, but it'll never sort of go past the Cornell walls,'" he said. "The only way we're going to be able to do this very manual thing is to automate the whole thing."
He also described the moment he trusted the software over his own reading of scans: "I prided myself on being a pretty good reader, and then what I realized is that when a computer can figure out the mathematical quantity within a pixel, that can be much, much more accurate than my eyeball can."
Screening for Heart Disease
Min's larger goal is screening people without symptoms. "The majority of people who will die of heart disease and heart attacks will never have any symptoms," he told TechCrunch in 2024. "At some point, we need to start screening the world for heart disease." Cleerly's TRANSFORM trial, chaired by Deepak Bhatt of Mount Sinai, is testing that approach at 125 US sites, with results expected in 2029.
In 2026 he has also pushed Cleerly into genetics. "Genetic risk and imaging answer two different questions for a physician," he said when Cleerly launched a polygenic risk test with Allelica.