Heartflow Accuses Rival of Building Competing AI Heart Tech on Stolen Secrets

Heartflow Inc. has filed a high-stakes patent infringement lawsuit against rival AI-cardiac diagnostics company Cleerly Inc., alleging that Cleerly's founder, former Heartflow consultant Dr. James Min, used confidential information and trade secrets to build competing products. The complaint, filed in the Eastern District of Texas, claims Cleerly's Ischemia, Plaque Analysis, and Compare tools infringe six Heartflow patents dating back to 2012.

Cleerly denies the allegations, calling them "baseless," but the case is drawing intense attention from AI‑patent specialists because of its potential to reshape how courts evaluate AI‑driven medical technologies.

Frank DeCosta, Finnegan parter and co‑lead of the firm’s AI + Patent practice, says the dispute will likely rely on the details of the patent claims rather than broad similarities between the products. He explains, "If somebody says at a high level, 'I have a patent on flying from Dallas to New York,’ that could be true, but if you look at the claims, it could be that one person’s patent requires a stopover in Chicago and the alleged infringer is stopping in Atlanta. That difference could be enough. They're both in the same space, getting from Dallas to New York, but the claim may not be infringed because you're doing it in a different way.” 

Frank also cautions that Heartflow’s FDA “de novo” clearance may not bolster its patent position. "The novelty in the eyes of the FDA approval process is very different; it’s not the same novelty test that the U.S. Patent Office puts patents through. It's entirely possible that the device may be a perfectly fine device for purposes of treating patients, but that conclusion by the FDA has potentially little bearing on whether the patents asserted meet the requirements of being patentable." 

He further raises the possibility that the asserted patents could be vulnerable under the Supreme Court’s Alice framework. If you have a device that simply replicates things that doctors have been doing for years, and what you do is use conventional technologies to speed up the analysis or do computations much faster than humans could, that by itself has been found by the courts to not be sufficient to make something patent eligible. Even though the Patent Office said, 'You get a patent,' many courts in battles like this one have looked at the patents and said the Patent Office made a mistake." 

Beyond the immediate dispute, Frank underscores the broader stakes for the industry. He said, "The law that we’re applying is quite old, and the technology it’s being applied to is quite new. The courts are doing their best to adapt, but you really need to keep up with the daily evolution of these cases, because as quickly as the technology is changing, the law is also changing to try to keep up.” 

Read Heartflow Accuses Rival of Building Competing AI Heart Tech on Stolen Secrets