AuntMinnie Founder Passes Away at 55

Dr. Phillip Berman, AuntMinnie.com founder, radiologist, and business entrepreneur died on February 8, 2009, due to complications from non-small cell lung cancer. He was 55 years old.

A trained radiologist, Dr. Berman either led or founded half-dozen companies in the radiology and Internet markets. He had a key role in the growth and development of several important trends in medical imaging, including teleradiology software, desktop-based computed radiography, and Internet publishing.

Dr. Berman graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, USA) in 1975. He received his medical degree cum laude from the Medical College of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA) in 1980, and completed his radiology residency at the University of California, San Diego (USA) in 1984.

For the next 10 years, Dr. Berman served as medical director or radiology department chairman at several hospitals and imaging centers in California and Arizona. In 1991, Dr. Berman branched out into software that would enable radiologists on call to read images from home rather than traveling to the hospital for emergency cases. He joined with software developer Henky Wibowo and sales and marketing executive Cary Cole to form CompuRad, which was one of the first firms in what later became a thriving cottage industry for teleradiology software with its PC Teleradiology application.

Dr. Berman took CompuRad public in August 1996, and in November 1997 the firm was acquired by Lumisys (Sunnyvale, CA, USA), a manufacturer of film digitizers. One year later Dr. Berman became CEO of the combined company.

While at the helm of Lumisys, Dr. Berman recognized another promising market niche--computed radiography (CR) systems that were small enough to be placed on desktops or at remote locations, according to Brain Casey, AuntMinnie.com Editor in Chief. Lumisys launched the ACR-2000 desktop CR reader in 1998 with the claim that the system's small size and price point made it more economical for hospitals and imaging centers to convert to digital X-ray.

The emergence of the Internet was the next business trend to capture Dr. Berman's notice, according to Dr. Casey. In the late 1990s, he believed that radiology deserved its own dedicated web portal and, in early 1999, he decided on the name "AuntMinnie.com.” The name was inspired by a term created in the 1940s by University of Cincinnati (OH, USA) radiologist Dr. Ben Felson to describe an obvious radiology case for which no differential diagnosis could exist.

AuntMinnie.com was launched at the 1999 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting (held yearly in Chicago, IL, USA), but just a few months later the Internet market collapsed in the dot-com bust. At the same time, the radiology market began to undergo a rapid period of consolidation that saw many small and mid-sized firms such as Lumisys bought up by larger competitors.

In April 2000, Dr. Berman announced that Lumisys had retained an investment firm to pursue "strategic alternatives” for both AuntMinnie.com and Lumisys. That process culminated in December 2000 with film and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) vendor Eastman Kodak (Rochester, NY, USA) acquiring the firms.

Dr. Berman continued on as a vice president at Kodak for the next three years, until he left the company in May 2003 to return to practicing radiology as director of imaging services at Carondelet Imaging Center (Tucson, AZ, USA). In January 2004, he was diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer and was forced to take medical leave.

Although at first given a diagnosis of having only six months to live, Dr. Berman's entrepreneurial enthusiasm continued, according to Mr. Casey. He saw the potential of the growing blog movement and realized that it could be utilized to create a forum for cancer survivors to communicate with each other and their loved ones. That led to the founding of another web site, RedToeNail.org, a name he chose after his own personal declaration to paint one toenail red for each year after his initial diagnosis.

Dr. Berman soon became an advocate for the rights of cancer patients, reported Mr. Casey, and was even profiled in a news piece on the television news channel CNN on the therapeutic power of blogging.

Dr. Berman is survived by his wife, Judy, and three children.

Related Links:
AuntMinnie.com
RedToeNail.org