Yunbaisheng: A Surgical Engine Platform Enabling Customizable, Low-Cost Robotics with 37ms Cloud Navigation Latency

Through game engines, companies can develop various games. Similarly, through its surgical engine, Yunbaisheng can customize a wide range of robots, compressing the development cycle for surgical robots to approximately three months, with costs ranging from only one to two million yuan per unit (excluding custom development fees).

Liu Fangde believes that in the era of Surgery 4.0, surgical robots should advance in terms of intelligence and application, going beyond merely serving as an extension of surgeons’ eyes and hands.

Overall, the surgical robotics industry remains in its early stages of development, with most robotic products still in the research and development and clinical trial phases, resulting in limited commercial scale.

The market penetration of surgical robots remains low, partly because, although they help medical personnel improve surgical efficiency and precision, their high development costs and selling prices mean that a single startup can cost tens of thousands of yuan.

Since its introduction to China in 2006, the da Vinci Surgical System has long held a monopoly in the surgical robotics industry, with prices once reaching as high as RMB 20 million.

Liu Fangde, founder of Yunbaisheng, believes that the future of surgical robots lies in primary care settings. For highly complex surgeries, even the most advanced robots cannot match the decades of experience accumulated by expert surgeons.Even the most advanced robots can only achieve 70% of the proficiency level of top-tier physicians.However, surgical robots can assist junior physicians in their training, enabling them to achieve a level of proficiency comparable to that of experts with over a decade of clinical experience within just a few months.

Dr. Liu believes that the greatest significance of surgical robots lies inHelping Junior Doctors Quickly Master Surgical Procedures, and enhance the medical service capabilities at the primary care level.

To establish a presence at the primary care level, Yunbaisheng strives to achieve low costs and high-quality service. The company leverages its core technologies to shorten the production cycle of surgical robots and control costs, while also aiming to develop “foolproof” robotic products that simplify operational procedures.

Liu Fangde completed his undergraduate studies at Harbin Institute of Technology, where he primarily focused on the development of industrial robotics. He later pursued a Ph.D. in the United Kingdom, specializing in computer graphics and imaging, during which time he gained extensive exposure to medical knowledge and applications.

Leveraging his expertise in robotics and image graphics, he ultimately remained at Imperial College London to lead the research and development of surgical robots. While engaged in the development of surgical robots and big data, Liu Fangde recognized the clinical potential of surgical robots and identified a blue ocean opportunity in the Chinese market.

At a time when imported surgical robots dominate the market, China should actively develop its own domestic brands to lower the barrier to the adoption of surgical robots.

Yunbaisheng was initially established in the UK, operating in fields such as AI, robotics, and 3D printing. Its return to China was originally intended to expand its market presence,—found a shared direction for collaboration with Venus MedTech, applying the technology to the field of structural heart disease.. Ultimately, the team chose to settle in Hangzhou and established Hangzhou Huxi Yunbaisheng Technology Co., Ltd.

Two partners in the team are both from Imperial College London. One of them, Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena, is one of the core inventors of ACRobot, an orthopedic surgical robot that was the world’s first to utilize active constraint technology. This force-control technology was later licensed to the orthopedic surgical robot Mako.

Another partner, Academician Guo Yike, is the Director of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College London. Active in the field of big data, he has developed a big data platform that has become the de facto global standard for translational medicine.

For more than two decades,Yunbaisheng continuously refines its robotic surgical navigation and force control technologies, enabling ultrasound guidance and force control on soft tissues, thereby expanding the application of surgical robots to neurosurgery, structural heart disease, and ophthalmology.The team has recruited approximately 20 professionals specializing in image-guided navigation, robotics, and big data, and continues to expand its workforce to establish a comprehensive talent framework for the company’s development.

Although China’s surgical robotics sector started relatively late, it has shown strong growth momentum driven by a series of policies and market demand, with many Chinese “da Vinci” systems emerging.

Yunbaisheng, however, has chosen a different development path. “We are not pursuing the route of domestic substitution, nor aiming to become China’s ‘Da Vinci’ to carve out a share of the existing market. Instead, we are committed to pioneering new frontiers,”Addressing the Most Urgent Clinical Needs。”

Huxi Yunbaisheng’s “core competency” is a surgical engine platform.Through this engine, the company can configure corresponding software and hardware according to the needs of different customers, and quickly develop various types of surgical robots.

Liu Fangde uses a game engine as an analogy for the surgical engine. “With a game engine, companies can develop various games. We are not just a gaming company; we are more like a developer of game engines, helping other gaming companies create their games.” The surgical engine acts like a “cheat code” in the novice village, enabling Chinese medical device companies to rapidly evolve into robotic surgery firms.

Yunbaisheng focuses on Class II medical devices, developing robots in the fields of ultrasound and biopsy, while also customizing robotic solutions for joint replacement and cardiac intervention procedures.

The company has developed proprietary dynamic measurement and calibration technology, which increases the precision of surgical robots by tenfold while enabling rapid startup, reducing the robot’s surgical preparation time from one to two hours to just a few milliseconds.

Furthermore, researchers are continuously optimizing the force control technology of robots. To enable robots to truly integrate into people’s daily lives, it is insufficient to rely solely on basic position control. In previous trials conducted by Yunbaisheng, surgical robots equipped with force control technology were able to perform operations on eggshells without causing the egg contents to leak, or engrave characters on the surface of jelly without deforming it.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yunbaisheng collaborated with Shenzhen Luohu Hospital to develop a nasopharyngeal swab robot. This robot utilizes LiDAR to identify over 500 landmark points for accurate facial recognition, and then employs pixel-wise registration technology to locate the nasal cavity. Furthermore, it adopts a high-precision dynamic calibration system for real-time path planning, enabling the swab to reach the sampling site accurately, where rotation-based sampling is performed via force feedback.

According to Dr. Liu Fangde,Nasopharyngeal swab robots can complete one test within 1 minute.。

The implementation of digital healthcare inevitably hinges on cost. While surgical navigation systems enable medical professionals to deliver precision medicine, their high implementation costs currently preclude large-scale deployment across the healthcare sector. Furthermore, introducing surgical navigation to primary care facilities would also face the challenge of high idle rates.

Yunbaisheng’s 5G Cloud Surgical Navigation System is the first system to leverage 5G and high-performance GPUs for real-time processing of complex medical images.

To facilitate deployment at the primary care level, 5G cloud-based surgical navigation must be fast, from responding to cloud desktop operations to displaying intraoperative imaging, tracking procedural progress, and transmitting result data back to the cloud desktop,The entire process has a data latency of only 37 ms.; for affordability, the system is cloud-based and accessible via a web browser, with billing charged by the second; for simplicity, medical personnel can become proficient in using the navigation system to perform surgeries within one to two months.

Yunbaisheng aims to reduce the usage costs for primary care hospitals while continuously improving service quality.

Under the guidance of its partner Venus Medtech, Yunbaisheng has developed a remote intelligent screening system for aortic valve replacement surgery. This system is primarily designed for early screening to help identify patients who require Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR). The diagnosis and treatment of such conditions typically necessitate multidisciplinary collaboration; however, primary care physicians often have limited experience and may be unaware that eligible patients can undergo TAVR therapy.

Through screening system testing, physicians can more accurately determine whether patients require treatment. “The images uploaded by physicians to the cloud contain hundreds of frames of data,”Our technology leverages AI to identify cardiac valve conditions from hundreds of frames of data.“...providing doctors with more accurate measurement results,” introduced Liu Fangde.

Currently, Yunbaisheng is actively expanding its industrial footprint in three key areas: structural heart disease, glioma, and joint replacement, having established close collaborations with Xijing Hospital of the Fourth Military Medical University and the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine.

Furthermore, the company’s collaboration with Luohu Hospital has attracted a cohort of clients from non-medical sectors, who seek to apply Yunbaisheng’s technologies to industrial domains such as flexible manufacturing, textiles, and quality control in the chemical industry.