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Physician Joshua Landy had the brainstorm for Figure 1, which allows health professionals to discuss images like this. It's a 3-D reconstruction of an angiogram, which revealed a stroke-inducing tear in a carotid artery.

One morning in May, a radiologist with the handle Penguinophile posts a CT scan on a social media app known as Figure 1. The image is accompanied by this shred of information: “Initial CT presents with hematuria and an abnormal ultrasound.” Within a few hours, the post has attracted 23 favourites, 41 follows and 29 comments, including one from a med student:

“Why is it always cancer? Sigh.”

“Because cancer sucks,” Penguinophile replies. “Don’t worry too much tho. About to post his 6 yr folo up.”

Every day, tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and paramedics, as well as students in all three professions, fire up Figure 1 to tune in to conversations just like this one. Scroll through the smartphone app and you’ll find thousands of photos of tumours, mangled limbs and inexplicable blotches, as well as ECG readings, scans and X-rays.

Stripped of any form of patient-ID information, each post becomes a launching pad for discussion among wired health professionals who, it would appear, have an insatiable appetite for digital shop-talk in the form of rapid-fire comment strings about what’s going on in these visceral images.

Three years since it went live, Figure 1 claims to have a million registered users. It has raised $11.6 million (U.S.) in three financing rounds, including one led by Union Square Ventures, the New York tech funding group behind Twitter.

The 35-employee Toronto outfit has experimented with advertising (mainly from drug or medical devices manufacturers) as a revenue source, and is planning another financing round within the next year. But early Figure 1 backer Roger Chabra, a partner in Rho Canada Ventures, says the investors are in no hurry to monetize the platform, opting instead to let the brand and the service grow organically. “We’re very patient,” he says. “I think there’s a bigger opportunity than advertising.”

The start-up, named for the labels on images in medical textbooks, is the brainchild of Joshua Landy, a Toronto critical-care physician who completed his specialist training in 2011. From the moment he began doing rounds as a med student, he noticed that doctors and nurses constantly snapped smartphone pictures of their patients’ ailments and texted them around for advice from colleagues. They also discussed cases on myriad Facebook groups. It was all completely informal and self-policing and non-commercial.

Landy realized it would be possible to scale up the sharing habits of his colleagues by creating a social media platform that allows the images to be seen by more users, and the feedback to be drawn from a much wider pool of professionals.

Some of the most-discussed images on Figure 1 have a touch of the bizarre. This is a 3-D reconstruction of a CT scan. The patient, ultimately relieved with laxatives, had no less than 63 packets of cocaine in his gastrointestinal tract.

After spending a few months at Stanford University studying the online habits of health-care professionals, he came back to Toronto and launched Figure 1 with two friends, Richard Penner, a software developer, and Gregory Levey, a Ryerson prof. The three had been mulling over the prospect of launching a start-up. “This idea galvanized them,” Landy says of his partners. Together, they quickly raised $325,000 from friends and family and soon found themselves talking about how Figure 1 was becoming “Instagram for doctors.”

The handle, though catchy and appealing to investors, doesn’t quite do Figure 1 justice, as the platform is oriented toward the continuing education expected of health-care professionals, says Lindsay Bisset, a Scarborough physician. “You can spend hours digging through the images.” But, she adds, users are expected to engage, not just lurk. “If you’re just a consumer, you’re not pulling your weight.” Figure 1 officials say there are an average of 20 responses per post, but won’t release metrics such as the number of posts from high-frequency users.

While the user base has grown organically through word-of-mouth, especially in the United States, Figure 1 has also primed the pump by offering students incentives.

Unlike other platforms, Figure 1 polices both the site and the content by validating users’ credentials and reviewing uploads so that privacy and medical relevance is maintained. The team of seven “community managers” includes two physicians and a staffer in Taiwan, so that requests from Asia can be processed in real time.

This image seemed to be a routine X-ray until a nurse realized the patient had implanted a credit card RFID chip in his hand in order to speed up payments.

Figure 1 has also systematically added structure to the service, with traffic-inducing features like the “case of the week” and a new direct-messaging function that will allow younger users to connect directly with experienced doctors and nurses—a form of social-media mentoring.

Landy and Chabra say they’re pondering various business models, including the possibility of transforming Figure 1 into a consumer-facing service that would allow patients to seek an online consultation for a flat fee (think UberMD).

Chabra also reports that Figure 1 has been approached by “strategic investors,” by which he means vertically integrated multinationals that want to purchase the platform to market their own health-related products. The company, so far, isn’t biting. “We don’t want to tie ourselves to a brand,” he says.

Indeed, Figure 1 officials are acutely aware of the delicate reality that their chatty user base, whose members patronize the platform for altruistic and educational motives, also represents a gold mine for the marketers of drugs, devices, insurance and the like.

As they ponder the company’s monetized future, the members of the Figure 1 team are trying to be mindful of the risk of fulfilling that old medical joke: The operation was a success, but the patient died.