BaiYiHui Secures Backing from Tencent, ByteDance, and Johnson & Johnson to Revolutionize Medical Communication Through Visualization

Using content as an entry point to convey medical information is key to deconstructing and communicating complex medical knowledge, enhancing public health literacy, and fostering genuine connectivity between patients and physicians.

However, the inherent seriousness, strong academic nature, and high knowledge barriers of medical content create a certain distance between it and the general public.

In the process of information dissemination, only by sharing a broadly consistent cultural background and common interpretation of the symbols serving as information carriers can intentional distortion and unintentional misunderstanding of the content be avoided. Therefore, the external dissemination of medical content requires combining life science knowledge with visual communication techniques to fully simplify the complexity of medical knowledge, thereby conveying higher education content to beginners in an accessible manner. This enables beginners to comprehend medical knowledge, thus reducing educational costs.

Baiyi Mapping Example

According to the “2021 Research Report on China’s Internet Medical Content Industry,” the market size of China’s internet medical content industry is projected to reach RMB 30.28 billion in 2021 and expand to RMB 65.27 billion by 2025. This indicates that the medical content market is emerging as a new growth hotspot.

Tencent Medical Dictionary has been continuously strengthening its “content + service” ecosystem, supported primarily by a science popularization platform and a service platform. This strategy precisely connects authoritative resources with patients, thereby enhancing its ability to acquire both patients and physicians. Beyond Tencent Medical Dictionary, other major internet companies such as ByteDance and Kuaishou have also demonstrated strong interest in medical science popularization, actively entering the medical content sector and leveraging their respective strengths to launch a diverse range of medical visualization products.

Shenzhen Baiyihui Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Baiyihui”) is a technology startup dedicated to medical visualization, bringing together top-tier medical visualization talents from both China and abroad. Through collaborative efforts, the team is committed to conveying medical information to the public in an intuitive and easily understandable manner via visualization.

Liu Yue, co-founder of Baiyihui, told VCBeat that the launch of these medical visualization products laid the foundation for the establishment of Baiyihui and provided a platform for showcasing its technical capabilities.

It is understood that Baiyihui was founded in Toronto, Canada, and established its headquarters in Shenzhen in 2021. The team comprises members from China, the United States, Canada, South Korea, and other countries. Its core members have all received prestigious domestic and international awards for medical visualization, and the majority of the team possesses a medical background.

Moreover, the company has maintained long-term collaborations with major internet companies, pharmaceutical firms, medical device manufacturers, domestic and international universities, research institutions, and hospitals. It also employs professionals with medical backgrounds, such as medical consultants, medical editors, experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and professors from North American higher education institutions, to provide expert medical advice and ensure the accuracy of medical information.

“North America already has a relatively mature industrial chain for medical visualization, whereas its importance has not yet been fully recognized in China. Regarding medical visualization, we aim to convey medical information intuitively with a professional and rigorous approach, making it both visible and tangible. Meanwhile, we seek to adaptively introduce the market demands and relatively mature solutions observed in North America to the Chinese context, enabling our country to fully leverage the advantages of medical visualization to drive the development of the healthcare industry.”Liu Yue told VCBeat.

After graduating from high school, Liu Yue majored in Pathology and Microbiology at the University of Toronto in Canada. During an anatomy class, she was captivated by the anatomical illustrations used by her instructor. Upon further learning about the field of “Medical Visualization,” Liu developed a strong interest. Delving deeper into this area, she pursued a Master’s degree in Biomedical Communications at the University of Toronto after completing her undergraduate studies, thereby embarking on her career as a professional medical illustrator.

After completing her master’s degree, Liu Yue served as a Medical Communication and Visual Designer at Baylis Medical, a subsidiary of Boston Scientific. She is a Professional Member of the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) in North America and has won an international award in the medical interaction category in the association’s competition. Her clients have included prestigious institutions such as the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and the journal Nature Communications. Following the pandemic, Liu Yue embarked on a part-time entrepreneurial journey together with Ji Chu, who holds a bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from the University of Toronto and a master’s degree in Biomedical Visual Communication from the same university. As their venture gained influence, Liu Yue ultimately decided to resign, return to China, and continue exploring the medical visualization market by launching a startup in Shenzhen.

The establishment of BaiYiHui has attracted members from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Toronto, Augusta University, Southwest Medical University, West China School of Medicine of Sichuan University, and Peking University Health Science Center, including physicians and medical students.Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Brain Development and Disorders, Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) Research Institute, Professor of Physiology and Academic Director at the University of Toronto, and Senior Fellow in the Department of Neurosciences and Mental HealthExperts including Dr. Wang Luyang and Dr. Chen Kui, Chairman of Dongyuan Life Science & Technology Co., Ltd., serve as advisors.

Regarding the division of organizational structure, Liu Yue told VCBeat:“The core team of Baiyi Hui comprises three distinct types of professionals: medical illustrators; individuals with pure medical backgrounds, such as medical consultants, medical editors, distinguished experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and professors at North American universities; and professionals with pure design backgrounds.“Among them, medical illustrators excel in visual communication; medical advisors and editors review content and provide professional medical guidance to ensure accuracy; while professionals with pure design backgrounds guarantee aesthetic appeal and product quality. BaiYiHui enhances efficiency by separating its medical and aesthetic departments, enabling collaborative task completion.”

In Liu Yue’s view, the importance of medical visualization content lies not only in its visual aesthetics and realism (high credibility), but also in its clear and effective communication (easy to understand) as well as its medical rigor and accuracy (high precision). It is precisely based on these three pillars that Baiyi Hui has devoted considerable effort to team building, product development, and technological research and development.

“We aim for Baiyi Hui to be not only a creator of visual aesthetics but also an entity with a strong medical background and robust information exchange capabilities,” said Liu Yue.

Baiyihui has established businesses in popular science medical illustrations and medical educational comics., and has established long-term strategic partnerships with Tencent Medical Encyclopedia and Xiaohe Medical Encyclopedia, a subsidiary of ByteDance, to provide users with ad-free, professional, and reliable medical science popularization content. Baiyihui employs visual presentation formats to bridge the gap between the general public and complex, difficult-to-understand medical knowledge.

To date, the company has produced over 2,000 illustrations for Tencent Medical Dictionary. By tracking real-time social trends and health-related discussions, and integrating engaging visual design with creative storytelling, the company effectively conveys medical narratives to satisfy users’ curiosity about a wide range of medical knowledge.

Moreover, BaiYiHui integrates world-leading concepts of information communication and visual effects,Showcase the functions of medical devices, mechanisms of drugs, and treatment processes through intuitive and easy-to-understand medical animations.The company’s production, “Chronic Kidney Disease: Eating Right,” won first prize in the 2015 NEJM Frontier of Medicine Medical Visualization Competition.

However, Baiyi Hui’s business extends far beyond this.Liu Yue believes that the initial market opportunities for domestic medical content were primarily driven by internet companies building medical science popularization platforms, but this is only the beginning of the market.As the importance of visual communication in medicine is increasingly recognized,Demand from medical enterprises both in China and abroad has begun to emerge.

Currently, Baiyi Hui has engaged with multiple projects,Furthermore, it empowers the products of technology-driven enterprises through medical illustrations, animations, and other formats, enabling buyers to clearly understand the features and advantages of newly launched products. This also helps create market differentiation for the products, thereby facilitating their promotion in the marketplace.

Not long ago, Baiyihui partnered with the Canadian company Kent Imaging to use 3D animation to help explain the functionality behind their newly launched product, SnapshotNIR.

Case Study: Baiyihui Partners with Kent Imaging

Additionally, comprehensive branding and packaging solutions for medical device and pharmaceutical companies constitute another major business segment.

Liu Yue stated, “Our end-to-end services encompass corporate website design and development, brand building, and product illustration and documentation. By thoroughly understanding the promotional needs of brand owners, we tailor a bespoke ‘suit’ for each client. We aim to help them shine on both domestic and international stages, ensuring that high-quality products are no longer overlooked.”

BaiYiHui’s Collaborative Project with Canadian Startup LSK

China currently faces a shortage of physicians. Zhong Nanshan, an expert in respiratory diseases and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, stated, “By 2030, there should be five general practitioners per 10,000 people. The current shortfall stands at 700,000, requiring universities to train 30,000 general practitioners annually. However, the current annual output is only 11,000, which is far from sufficient. Although many primary-care physicians are now undergoing general practitioner training, issues regarding both quantity and quality persist.”

In the face of challenges such as improving education quality and accelerating training pace, interaction may be the answer.

“Regardless of the type of medical illustration or animation, it will ultimately be embedded into medical interactive systems, transforming learners from passive recipients of knowledge into active participants engaged in interactive learning. Therefore, human-computer interaction is our ultimate goal. Specifically, medical interactive training software helps shorten the physician training cycle, lowers the barrier to understanding new equipment, and deepens comprehension of diseases and surgical techniques. Subsequently, we will gradually transition toward comprehensive medical training, enabling healthcare enterprises, medical schools, and other institutions to access high-quality teaching aids for training students and mastering complex medical concepts,” said Liu Yue at the end of the interview.

It is understood that the Baiyi Hui team utilized software such as Unity, MAYA, AI, and PS to develop Jawbone3D, a simulation teaching software designed for dental students., it visualizes diseases hidden deep within the oral cavity, which are difficult to observe with the naked eye, through augmented reality (AR), enabling students to more conveniently learn about dental diseases.

Jawbone3D Project

Meanwhile,BaiYiHui also leverages programming and medical visualization technologies to facilitate knowledge dissemination, addressing the issues of opacity and asymmetry in professional information.By leveraging various design tools such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Maya, Adobe Illustrator (AI), and Photoshop (PS), the complex adenovirus gene expression diagrams are transformed into intuitive, interactive web-based visualizations. This approach has been widely adopted in virology courses at the University of Toronto, enabling more scholars studying adenoviruses to comprehend the intricate imagery and scientific knowledge presented in the original figures.

Since the birth of the World Wide Web in 1991, digital technology has advanced rapidly. This technology has not only created online platforms rich in discursive semiotic resources but also propelled content dissemination to new heights. Since then, the discursive forms of content dissemination have undergone a transformation. The dissemination of medical content is no longer confined to traditional channels such as newspapers, books, television, and offline lectures; instead, it has gradually migrated online, leveraging the “Internet Plus” trend, giving rise to diverse emerging communication methods including short videos, online Q&A sessions, live streaming, and illustrated articles.

Baiyihui has undoubtedly seized the market opportunities hidden in the transformation of medical content dissemination formats.