With the rapid development of information technology, many industry sectors have ushered in disruptive changes. In the medical industry, with the continuous integration of medical and technology, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data are increasingly used in public health services, and unprecedented changes in the way people seek medical treatment.
With the continuous development of electronic endoscopy technology in recent years, more and more patients choose medical electronic endoscopy for examination or surgery. The number of doctors who can use various endoscopes for diagnosis has not increased significantly, and the non-standardization of diagnostic standards has become more and more serious, resulting in many lesions not being found and treated in time, resulting in the development of initial lesions into cancer.
<h1>The endoscope implants an AI "gene" to accurately detect the lesion site</h1>
Ruijian Technology combines artificial intelligence and endoscopy to quickly feedback the test results to doctors, greatly improving the detection rate of lesions; providing assistance and guidance for inexperienced doctors; and improving the diagnostic level of grass-roots doctors.
The Ruijian endoscopic AI auxiliary chip uses a programmable chip based on an FPGA to compile the neural network algorithm for disease detection into a hardware chip, so that the chip can be fully utilized in the two upgrade methods. One is the way of software upgrade, which not only improves the performance of the chip, but also saves labor costs, and the other is the method of hardware upgrade, which not only reduces the operating costs of enterprises, but also enhances product competitiveness.
Compared with traditional digestive endoscopy, this device relies on the training of millions of images of gastrointestinal lesions, which can accurately and instantly detect and indicate lesion sites during endoscopic examination, including tiny polyps that are usually easily missed by the naked eye.
The Ruijian Technology team is composed of the main creative members Yu Zheqi, Liu Nian and Du Yue.
Ruijian Technology team Yu Zheqi (middle), Liu Nian (left), Du Yue (right) group photo
Yu Zheqi, PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, has reached professional standards in many fields such as chip integration design and image processing algorithms such as ARM and FPGA, and is currently mainly responsible for the development of software and hardware for team products; Liu Nian, who graduated from the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, majored in corporate strategy, 6 years of entrepreneurial project management experience allowed him to perform with ease in target customer positioning, differentiated strategic design, brand development strategy design, and is currently mainly responsible for marketing departments and enterprise cooperation. As the only woman on the team, Du Yue, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, specializes in gene editing and therapy, cancer diagnosis and targeted drug development, and developmental genetic biology.
The three of them met for a roadshow event, when Yu Zheqi, who was a technician at the time, gave a speech about the prototype of the project, and Liu Nian and Du Yue, as observers, immediately showed great interest in the project. After the roadshow, the three of them talked about the entire details of the project together, and Yu Zheqi considered that the project needed cooperation from business and medical backgrounds at that time, and proposed the idea of forming a team to develop the project together. At the end of 2018, this team was officially born.
Yu Zheqi told Chuangcheng Hui that after many declarations and roadshow polishing, the project was shortlisted for the "Chunhui Cup Chinese Overseas Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition" this year. "This is the biggest affirmation of our project. We firmly believe that the combination of the two will rub out a more brilliant spark, and ultimately dedicate our strength to the country's scientific and technological cause. His excitement was self-evident.
<h1>Defend China's "core" with actions</h1>
When talking about the original intention of starting a business, Yu Zheqi said that at that time, he chose to study abroad, but also hoped to make a contribution to the motherland's scientific and technological field, bring the latest overseas technology to the medical field that urgently needs emerging technologies, and graft it into the domestic market. But he gradually felt the technological gap that existed between China and developed countries in his field.
Yu Zheqi, founder of Ruijian Technology Team
The desire to bring these technologies back home grew stronger, so Yu Zheqi used his spare time to start working part-time in foreign technology companies. Since July 2016, the up-and-coming Yu Zheqi has been responsible for the design of pedestrian detection hardware acceleration heterogeneous chips in the Xilinx Hardware Design Competition Europe Finalist, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is responsible for the automatic frequency scaling project of embedded acceleration coprocessors... Until now, he has been working at TransReport Smart Mobility for the Disabled, responsible for the development of low-power neuromimetic chips for fall detection.
He hopes to be able to realize the technical value through the experience accumulated in the projects of foreign companies, and then realize the technical value in the form of independent entrepreneurship, bringing different attempts to the domestic technology industry.
Yu Zheqi said frankly that the biggest problem faced in the early stage of entrepreneurship is data collection. Because the project involves the field of artificial intelligence, the more data there is, the higher the accuracy rate. But the access to medical data information made him look embarrassed, especially the endoscopic recognition data that the doctor had already labeled.
"However, with the addition of Dr. Du Yue, our difficulty in collecting data has been reduced. There is more and more collaboration with the medical community, the access to data is more specialized, and the previous data has also received technical guidance. I believe that in the future, more hospitals will come to cooperate with us on projects, and they will also get more and more professional data to improve our algorithms. ”
He also mentioned: "Compared with some intelligent identification endoscopic equipment on the market, such as Olympus, there are many drawbacks in price and technology, and the transaction price of millions of dollars leads to large hospital upgrade costs; the monopoly of technology makes it impossible for domestic manufacturers to use." However, Ruijian Technology can control the price of intelligent upgrade peripherals at around 45,000 yuan, the cost of hospital upgrade is extremely low, and Ruijian Technology is compatible with more than 80% of the equipment on the market, such as encountering special interfaces, we can also customize and specialize in production. ”
<h1>Jump out of the "wall" and expand your thinking</h1>
As a start-up company, Yu Zheqi has gone to several top three hospitals in Changsha to try his luck and try to negotiate cooperation. Without exception, he ate behind closed doors at four endoscopic testing hospitals.
"That day, I sat on the stool in the hospital from noon to more than eight o'clock in the evening, and the registered patients changed batch after batch, although they finally waited for the attending doctor, but they were told that the hospital procurement was to be tendered, so there was no way to cooperate directly."
Yu Zheqi sighed with emotion and could not help but think: there are so many patients in the hospital, and doctors are so busy, what should be done to promote medical efficiency?
He suddenly realized that he seemed to have entered a "dead end", slowly opened his mind, and found that he had been limiting the eyes of medical devices to hospitals, and ignored that to open up the whole industry chain cooperation, he could actually start from endoscopic manufacturers.
This experience made him understand that innovation is a personal ability and the source of enterprise development; "ingenuity" is a cultural inheritance and the foundation of the enterprise.
Yu Zheqi often said: "To the ingenuity, dare to innovate." For any entrepreneur, it is necessary to cultivate the core capabilities with the heart of a craftsman to achieve the purpose of serving users. The industry is constantly innovating and changing, and only enterprises that stand at the forefront of innovation, focus on the future and have the spirit of ingenuity can 'laugh to the end'. ”
Yu Zheqi said that the landing of the project in China is the main goal of the team at this stage: "Through the previous roadshow activities and competitions, on the one hand, the project level was improved during the roadshow; on the other hand, it also understood the local policies and industrial parks. In the project review of the third batch of Chinese Intelligent Town in Hangzhou Future Science and Technology City in 2019, the AI endoscopic auxiliary equipment project stood out from 185 projects, as an opportunity for overseas high-level talents to successfully obtain the support of Hangzhou Haichuang Park. ”
At present, Ruijian Technology is seeking 3.6 million yuan of financing to further accelerate the landing of the project. Ruijian Technology empowers medical treatment with technology to help users reduce the cost of medical treatment, improve the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment, and optimize the quality of medical services. The country's emphasis on the field of smart medical care has made the chip industry more and more marketable in China. In the future, more and more patients will be able to enjoy more efficient and comfortable medical services.