From AI Medical Imaging to Surgical Robotics: How Ruixin Medical Empowers Physicians as the Brain, Eyes, and Hands in Cardiovascular Care

Cardio-cerebrovascular is a track with extremely high growth potential.

Since 2018, nearly 30 cardiovascular intelligent medical products have been successively approved. The field of vascular interventional surgical robotics, on the verge of an explosion, has also attracted significant funding over the past two years. In just one year, the accumulated financing exceeded 1.5 billion RMB. The value of this track is skyrocketing.

However, due to the extremely high complexity in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, there are still many challenges to be overcome for practitioners who want to take the lead in this field.

First, the human vascular system is highly complex and closely interconnected with various organs. Precisely simulating real conditions—including vascular morphology, the role of different organs, and the terminal circulatory system in models—and providing patients with the most accurate diagnostic results is extremely challenging. Achieving realistic simulations of the human vascular structure by integrating technologies like computational fluid dynamics and artificial intelligence requires extensive exploration and accumulation over a long period.

Secondly, the commonly used carotid ultrasound, transcranial Doppler (TCD), magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), CT angiography (CTA), and digital subtraction angiography (DSA) in clinical practice have pain points such as focusing only on the vascular lumen, lacking lesion information, difficulty in identifying vulnerable plaques, and inability to provide precise diagnostic and treatment basis for clinical use. Developing diagnostic methods that can address these pain points and provide doctors with more reliable, non-invasive, and accurate diagnostic support is highly challenging.

Finally, vascular interventional surgery is a procedure with extremely high precision requirements. Doctors not only need to clarify the access route for the intervention before the operation, complete the corresponding angiography, and confirm the location, nature, and severity of the lesion, but also need to construct a three-dimensional model of the blood vessels by combining two-dimensional vascular images with their own anatomical knowledge. Only then can they rely on their sense of touch and experience to manipulate catheters and guidewires through narrow, tortuous nerves and blood vessels with extremely thin walls within the patient's body to reach the lesion site. The surgery is highly challenging, and ensuring precision and safety is difficult.

Therefore, only by building a stable operation from preoperative surgical planning, to intraoperative real-time navigation, and then to precise force feedback, can we form a complete closed loop from AI supercomputing + surgical robot hardware, empowering doctors' brains, eyes, and hands. This is the key to truly solving the full-process pain points of screening, diagnosing, and treating cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and leading the field.

The "Report on Cardiovascular Health and Diseases in China 2020" shows that the number of people suffering from cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases in China has exceeded 330 million, and the incidence rate continues to rise. The mortality rate of coronary heart disease alone has increased from 27-39 deaths per 100,000 people in 2002 to 120-128 deaths per 100,000 people in 2018, with a mortality rate increase of more than 270%.

Shenzhen Raysightmed Co, Ltd. ("RaysightMed"), founded by three experts who studied in the United States, had already foreseen the development trend of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases before 2017. They believed that the explosive growth of the patient population in the future would lead to a significant increase in pressure on national finances and medical resources. To truly solve the challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, it is necessary to develop a series of new technologies that can assist in the screening and treatment of these diseases at a lower cost and with higher accuracy, further improving diagnostic efficiency and reducing the burden on patients.

RaysightMed CEO Zheng Lingxiao addressed the three major pain points in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases as follows:

First, for doctors, the film-reading workload is high. Statistics show that an ordinary radiology department doctor in a tertiary hospital needs to search for stenosis and plaques among more than 9,000 coronary CTA images every day, while also performing complex post-processing, diagnosis, and report writing on the images, resulting in an extremely heavy film-reading workload.

Secondly, the clinical lack of non-invasive and precise diagnostic methods fails to provide doctors with better decision-making for diagnosis and treatment. The proportion of missed diagnoses and misdiagnoses in clinical practice is high, with approximately 65% of patients with borderline coronary heart disease undergoing unnecessary coronary angiography procedures, imposing a significant burden on doctors, patients, and healthcare expenditure.

Finally, traditional vascular interventional surgery is difficult and time-consuming, with precision and safety being hard to guarantee. This technique also heavily relies on the doctor's operational skills. Not only does it have a high threshold, but it also requires medical staff to invest significant time and effort into learning. It poses a challenge for both top-tier hospitals and grassroots facilities with relatively scarce medical resources. Additionally, vascular interventional surgery exposes doctors to prolonged X-ray radiation, significantly shortening their professional lifespan.

Based on an in-depth understanding of clinical pain points, as well as the team's accumulation in AI deep learning algorithms, scientific computing algorithms, cloud computing, and other areas, RaysightMed has incubated a series of products in nearly five years since its establishment, including the "Raysight Coronary Intelligent Post-Processing Platform," "RuiXin-FFR," and "Intelligent Operating Room." It has built a product system covering screening, diagnosis, and treatment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Furthermore, it continues to lead its high-end professional technical team in exploring the application of dual-driven software and hardware technologies in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular scenarios.

In response to the challenge of difficult film reading,RaysightMed Launches "Rui Xin Coronary Intelligent Post-Processing Platform"By leveraging big data, artificial intelligence, and multi-modal imaging technology, algorithms are trained to learn interventional imaging results. This achieves precision comparable to invasive coronary angiography (coronary CTA resolution: 0.4mm, coronary angiography resolution: 0.1mm, IVUS OCT resolution: 0.01-0.03mm) in a non-invasive manner. On the premise of accurately identifying and locating plaque types, it further reduces subjective differences among image readers and completes "CTA image processing analysis - diagnosis - report generation" within 3-5 minutes.

It is reported that the RaysightMed Coronary Intelligent Post-processing Platform obtained NMPA certification in September 2021 and was officially launched, becoming the first international company to receive dual certifications for coronary CTA morphology and functional products.

In response to the pain point in clinical practice where there is a lack of non-invasive and precise diagnostic methods, which prevents doctors from making better treatment decisions,RaysightMed has launched "RuiXin-FFR," which integrates "morphology" and "functionality."Based on morphological information, this product provides functional information such as vascular blood supply function assessment, vascular plaque development, and rupture risk judgment, reducing clinical misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis rates, decreasing unnecessary coronary angiography, and being able to replace the FFR guidewire-assisted judgment process through preoperative planning. It can effectively save manual quality control time, reducing the burden on doctors, patients, and healthcare expenditure.

Data shows that "RuiXin-FFR" completed the largest prospective clinical trial in the same field with 330 cases across multiple centers. Currently, it has an accuracy rate of 92%, specificity of 90%, and sensitivity of 95%, all leading globally.

RaysightMed's cardiovascular interventional surgical robot, combined with the Raysight Coronary Intelligence Post-Processing Platform and RuiXin-FFR, completes an empowerment of the diagnostic and therapeutic closed loop from "early screening, precise detection, preoperative planning, intraoperative guidance for precision operation, to postoperative management." It truly provides doctors with capabilities that surpass human limits in brain, vision, and hands.

It is reported that the "RaysightMed Cardiovascular Interventional Surgical Robot" features a master-slave structure with full independent intellectual property rights. Using the control lever on the master side, doctors can manipulate three types of instruments: guidewires, balloon/stent catheters, and guiding catheters. The slave side incorporates a precision mechanical structure designed to mimic the human hand, enabling the robot to perform various movements as flexibly as a human hand. Meanwhile, RaysightMed has also developed real-time surgical navigation technology based on advanced imaging algorithms to provide visual feedback for doctors. Currently, the RaysightMed Cardiovascular Interventional Surgical Robot has completed more than ten animal experiments and successfully performed the world's first operation in May 2022 using the same device without changing the transmission mechanism to conduct stent surgeries in three areas: coronary, renal aorta, and peripheral.

Zheng Lingxiao mentioned: "Relying solely on 'surgical robots' can hardly address the real pain points in the treatment process of a disease. Only by establishing an integrated platform system—from preoperative planning to intraoperative imaging guidance, from intraoperative operation to postoperative evaluation—can we have the opportunity to overcome the difficulties in disease treatment. RaysightMed hopes to build a complete ecosystem that combines software and hardware for integrated cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diagnosis and treatment through advanced algorithms and hardware support. This includes providing better 3D image reconstruction, surgical planning, real-time navigation, and a surgical operation platform. To surpass human limits, surpass the human brain, eyes, and hands."

The Da Vinci surgical robot can be considered a "myth" in the medical industry.

A Review of the Development History of the Da Vinci Surgical Robot Reveals One of Its Key Strategies: A Series of Technological Enhancements Focused on Critical Surgical Procedures, Along with Continuous Optimization of User Experience and Cost-Value. From the Perspective of Current Healthcare Development in China, This Remains an Excellent Competitive Strategy Worth Learning From and Referencing.

RaysightMed is forging its own path with its own strength.