Elucid

What is Elucid and who sells it?

Elucid Bioimaging, Inc. is a Boston company focused on coronary atherosclerosis. In September 2026 it announced an oversubscribed US$55M Series D, with a new, unnamed public medtech strategic investor plus IAG Capital Partners and Elevage Medical Technologies (MassDevice and Radiology Business). Lifetime funding is about US$185M according to the same coverage.

How does PlaqueIQ work?

A physician sends CCTA images to Elucid. Image restoration reduces motion and calcium blooming, trained analysts segment a 3D model of the coronary arteries, and the software identifies and quantifies the tissue (company release, October 2024). Because analysts are part of the workflow, results do not arrive instantly. Elucid says the output was validated against histology, which is the vendor's claim.

Two additions followed. A Lesion Inspection Tool for coronary and carotid plaque became commercially available in April 2026. MassDevice describes non-invasive FFR-CT analysis as pending FDA review, so it is not cleared.

What are its regulatory and payment status?

The FDA cleared PlaqueIQ as K241524 on 12 September 2024 (product code LLZ, 21 CFR 892.2050). A second PlaqueIQ 510(k), K261855, has a decision date of 18 September 2026. The cleared claim is plaque quantification to support clinicians, and the FDA record does not extend it to diagnosis of disease.

Category I CPT code 75577 for quantitative coronary plaque analysis took effect on 1 January 2026. The national average Medicare payment is about $1,012 in imaging centers and physician offices and $951 under OPPS (DAIC and a company release).

Elucid lists no EHR or PACS integration and no HIPAA, SOC 2 or HITRUST attestation.

What does the evidence say?

No published study evaluates PlaqueIQ, and trade coverage comes from the vendor. Two on-topic papers cover quantitative CCTA plaque analysis: a 2024 Current Problems in Cardiology study of intra- and inter-reader reproducibility (PMID 38688396) and a 2023 Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine paper on plaque morphology biomarkers from the EVAPORATE trial (PMID 37600044). Neither can be tied to Elucid software, so neither counts as evidence for PlaqueIQ. The other three papers tagged to Elucid, on epilepsy and dementia and on cell-free DNA in lung cancer, are unrelated.

How much does Elucid cost?

Elucid bills providers per analysis and gives no list price (as of October 2026). The Medicare payment above is what the performing site receives, which sets the revenue side of the economics. The fee Elucid charges against it is unknown.

How does it compare?

HeartFlow Plaque Analysis and Cleerly are the closest competitors and share the same CPT category. Caristo's CaRi-Heart and plaque tools from Canon and Siemens also appear in comparisons. No head-to-head data settles which is best on accuracy or turnaround.

The verdict

Elucid makes sense for a practice that will bill CPT 75577 regularly and can wait for an analyst-assisted report. A practice with low CCTA volume, or one that needs same-day plaque numbers, should pass. Get the turnaround time and the per-scan fee in writing first, since those two numbers decide whether the economics work.