United Imaging Healthcare Unveils the uAI Platform at the 1st United Innovation Summit

• The release of United Imaging's uAI platform brings the future of intelligent medicine closer with the introduction of 3 intelligent advanced medical equipment and 10 intelligent diagnostic applications.
• United Imaging's CEOs predict that 5.0T whole-body MR, photon-counting CT and integrated radiotherapy solutions such as RT represent the future of medical devices.
• Top experts in Chinese medical domain share the latest collaborative results gained from United Imaging's research platform, including studies of Magnetic Resonance in Traditional Chinese Medicine and diagnosis and treatment integration based on United Imaging's digital PET-CT scans.

SHANGHAI, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- United Imaging Healthcare (UIH) held the Inaugural United Innovation Summit (uInnovation) in Shanghai on April 11, 2018. During the event, United Imaging unveiled the uAI platform, while top clinical and technical experts gathered together to share their thoughts on how to shape the future of medical imaging.

Xue Min, the Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer of United Imaging, said in his speech that "Innovation is the driving force and foundation of United Imaging. Innovation requires the integration and cooperation of all parties. United Imaging hopes to build uInnovation into a forum for releasing United Imaging's innovative products and technologies as well as an innovation platform for communicating forward-looking industry information and cutting-edge ideas, integrating innovative resources, and promoting collaboration."

Xue said, "At uInnovation, industrial, clinical, and academic experts will join hands to form an innovation community so that we can realize more breakthrough ideas and explore further into the future."

United Imaging Intelligence Presented the uAI Platform

During the event, Dinggang Shen and Sean Zhou, co-CEOs of United Imaging Intelligence, a subsidiary of United Imaging, showed up along with the subsidiary's "Dream Team" to present the uAI platform. As an open AI platform involving different product lines, uAI will empower imaging and radiotherapy equipment and the uCloud to assist doctors with efficient and precise diagnosis and treatment. In addition, a friendly and open AI ecosystem will be built based on the uAI platform.

Dinggang Shen said, "uAI is a friendly AI platform that empowers a full portfolio of imaging equipment, cloud services, as well as doctors themselves. We will do our best to help our partners to make AI their best friend."

Sean Zhou said, "We will bring in new partners to set up AI training classes to help doctors learn more about AI. We will cooperate with partners to create new AI products and help some doctors be pioneers in the field of AI. We will open up AI platforms to support doctors in developing and releasing their own AI products. We firmly believe that only by allowing more doctors to join us and cooperate with us on AI development can we fight against the tens of thousands of diseases."

Dinggang Shen said, "AI won't replace doctors, but doctors who know embrace AI will replace those who don't."

At present, United Imaging Intelligence has released 10 intelligent diagnostic applications including uAI Smart Chest X-ray Assistant, uAI Mammo Risk Assessment, etc., as well as 3 intelligent advanced medical imaging devices, including uCT 528, uCS 1.5T MR and Intelligent Digital PET-CT. The development of these AI products was initiated two years ago before being integrated into the uAI platform recently.

• The uAI Smart Chest X-ray Assistant, which is trained by 200,000 cases, is able to "read" chest X-rays based on deep learning algorithms, providing highly-sensitive, accurate, and rapid screening and detection of abnormal images. The uAI Smart Chest X-ray Assistant can highlight suspected diseased areas, which gives junior doctors more confidence in decision making and offers greater efficiency for senior doctors.
• The uAI platform enables the automatic generation of multiple VOIs on human vascular system using deep learning technology. Based on these VOIs, the drug concentration curve in blood vessels over time, i.e., input functions, can be extracted from the corresponding PET images. This allows the applications of both whole-body parametric imaging studies as well as special studies of key organs such as the brain, lungs, liver, and kidneys.
• The uAI platform provides automatic delineation of organs at risk for radiotherapy planning. With it, not only can doctors complete an organ's delineation in an average of 0.7 seconds without the need for complicated operations, but there are also significant improvements in accuracy. Moreover, AI scientists in United Imaging optimized the inference engine of deep network and reduce its memory consumption by 28 times compared to open source ones. Thereby, this advanced intelligent feature can be deployed on low-end hardware and mobile devices.
  
• uCT 528, one of the 3 intelligent advanced medical imaging devices, helps boost efficiency in CT scanning scenarios. In the past, CT technician were required to go through complicated procedures such as position selection, patient positioning, and scanning range planning, which resulted in time-consuming imaging process  and inconsistent image quality. The uCT 528, however, can confirm the positioning of patients of different genders, ages, and scanning positions through face detection, enabling one-button automatic positioning. In this way, not only has efficiency been improved, but the accuracy and standardization of positioning is also guaranteed, ensuring overall image quality. At present, this application can handle 70% of body positions involved in daily CT scanning.

CEOs from United Imaging Healthcare Made Predictions About Innovation in the Future

During the summit, CEOs of United Imaging introduced the latest products and core technologies from their platforms and made predictions about innovation in the future.

United Imaging now boasts a fully-fledged system product profolio ranging from clinical 1.5T MR and 3.0T MR to high-end scientific research 3.0T MR and multimodal PET/MR. In addition, it offers world-leading performance in magnetic field uniformity and magnet gradients. United Imaging believes that the next step in the development of MR will be greater speed, more practicality, lower sound output, richer clinical data, and higher field strength systems. As a result, United Imaging will be focusing on the development of advanced 5.0T whole-body MR and infant MR, providing clinicians with high-value bespoke solutions.

In the near future, United Imaging will launch Photon Counting CT and Sparse Sampling CT scanners, making accurate, quantitative and safe clinical applications a reality. Based on the currently-available CT-linac scanner, United Imaging will also offer integrated radiotherapy solutions such as RT and MR, broadening the clinical applications of radiotherapy. Based on its uAI platform, United Imaging will introduce compressive sensing and iterative reconstruction algorithms combined with deep learning to create a fully intelligent "robot" DR product that allows doctors to instantly acquire diagnostic reports simply with the push of a button on the scanner.

Top Clinical Experts Shared the Latest Results of Collaboration with United Imaging

"United Imaging has provided a feasible platform for the research of TCM mechanisms, allowing the functional magnetic resonance study of acupuncture and moxibustion to really break through technical limitations." Said Zhan Songhua, director of the radiology department of Shuguang Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai University of TCM.

United Imaging and Shuguang Hospital jointly completed the world's first real-time imaging experiments for magnetic resonance imaging for head electroacupuncture brain functions two years ago. Together they built a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) MR, combining an MR system with coils, sequence technology, and scan protocols specially tailored for the requirements of TCM. The TCM MR can be used for efficacy evaluation and mechanistic studies of Chinese treatment techniques such as full body acupuncture and tuina massages, and also provides a complete set of customized hardware and software solutions for a series of diseases where TCM offers advantages, including strokes, orthopedics, anal fistulas, and dermatology.

United Imaging's uCS MR imaging technology is also helping partners to explore more possibilities for clinical research. United Imaging's uCS MR can truly capture the dynamic inflow process of contrast agents, and has shed new light on the clinical application of contrast agents in liver cancer.

In addition, based on the high resolution of United Imaging's digital PET-CT, the First Hospital of Nanjing has achieved diagnosis and treatment integration that provides a basis for the selection of radiopharmaceuticals, choice of treatment options, and evaluation of curative effects. United Imaging's PET/MR scanners can undertake multi-bed, full-body scans and single-bed MRI scans, taking full advantage of molecular imaging's advantages in the fields of clinical and scientific research and helping Zhongshan Hospital's Department of Nuclear Medicine to make further advances in precision medicine.

About UIH

Shanghai United Imaging Healthcare Co., Ltd. (UIH) develops and produces a full portfolio of advanced medical products covering the entire process of imaging diagnosis and treatment, and offers innovative medical IT solutions. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Shanghai, United Imaging has established R&D centers worldwide.
http://www.united-imaging.com/en/home/ 

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