World AI Conference | Accelerating Medical AI Development: Shukun Leads Dual Realization of Clinical Value and Commercial Success

The 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference brought together more than 40,000 attendees from over 40 countries, with total exhibition visits exceeding 200,000, gathering top global AI companies. As one of the conference’s flagship themes, the 2019 Global AI Health Summit was held concurrently. Speeches were delivered by Zong Ming, Vice Mayor of Shanghai; Houlin Zhao, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union; leaders from the Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; and leaders from the Department of Planning Development and Informatization of the National Health Commission. In addition, representatives from institutions such as the UK’s NHS, the Medical Industry Division of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Hospital Management Center of the National Health Commission, along with multinational corporations including Roche Diagnostics, IBM Watson, AstraZeneca China, and Johnson & Johnson, attended the event to share insights on key topics.

As a leading innovative startup in AI-driven healthcare technology, SHUKUN’s Chairman, Mao Xinsheng, was invited to deliver a keynote speech titled “Human-AI Collaborative Intelligence: Building Digital Doctors to Empower Healthcare.” He demonstrated to global attendees that artificial intelligence has moved beyond academic research papers and is already generating substantial clinical value in the medical industry, with accelerated progress in industrialization and commercial deployment. As the closing keynote of the Health Summit, Chairman Mao’s powerful and insight-rich presentation energized the entire venue, earning high praise from both Chinese and international experts and bringing the conference to its climax.

Mao Xinsheng emphasized that the deep and comprehensive integration of AI technology with key clinical scenarios is a crucial foundation for realizing tangible value. In China, the annual growth rate of medical imaging exceeds 30%, far outpacing the 4% annual increase in the number of radiologists. The complexity and repetitive nature of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diagnostics consume substantial time and energy from physicians. Therefore, there is an urgent need for “AI physician” assistance from both the patient and provider perspectives; the demand is not only enormous but also highly pressing.

SHUKUN AI has pioneered a global breakthrough in overcoming technical challenges, enabling the “instant” reconstruction of digital organs such as the “Digital Heart” and “Digital Brain” from medical images. It not only automatically detects lesions and identifies medical history but also integrates morphological and functional analyses to deliver precise diagnostic results urgently needed by clinicians. This innovation reduces the diagnosis time for a single case from over 30 minutes to under 5 minutes, truly providing doctors and patients with an much-needed “Digital Doctor Assistant.”

This entirely new productivity paradigm, created through AI, not only meets the urgent needs of physicians and enhances hospital efficiency and revenue generation, but also delivers tangible benefits to China’s 290 million patients with cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, effectively placing “millions of digitally empowered senior specialists at their bedside.” Hospital data indicate that after implementing SHUKUN AI, case volume doubled while labor and time requirements were reduced by half. SHUKUN’s cardiovascular AI-assisted diagnostic system has been adopted in 42 cities across China. Preliminary statistics show that SHUKUN AI assists in the imaging diagnosis of one-sixth of all coronary CTA examinations nationwide, working alongside tens of thousands of physicians and truly benefiting hundreds of millions of patients.

Widespread recognition and trust in AI medical products among physicians require rigorous scientific validation. Guided by a physician-centric approach, SHUKUN initiated its strategic layout in early 2018 and conducted the world’s largest multicenter comparative study between AI and gold standards. This multicenter trial was strictly executed in accordance with international standards for multicenter research and is one of the few study protocols registered with the World Health Organization (WHO). Samples were collected from 42 hospitals across China that routinely perform clinical coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) examinations, with scientific statistical planning applied to equipment models, hospital tiers, geographic regions, and disease epidemiology. The multicenter study objectively demonstrated that the efficiency of “AI + physician” significantly exceeds that of physicians working alone, and that the competency of “AI + physician” is equivalent to that of senior attending physicians at top-tier tertiary hospitals. With its safety and reliability effectively validated, SHUKUN AI has achieved high user stickiness and widespread adoption in numerous hospitals across China.

This multicenter study on coronary AI has, for the first time, established standards for validating the efficacy of medical AI, providing scientific support for the clinical application of medical AI and offering data references for national regulatory agencies in rule-making, thereby exerting significant global influence. Yang Zhenghan, Director of the Department of Radiology at Beijing Friendship Hospital and lead investigator of the study, stated, “The Coronary AI Multicenter Study represents the first scientific validation of AI accuracy worldwide, with a sample size far exceeding that of similar multicenter studies.”

In 2019, SHUKUN rapidly advanced the commercial deployment of its products. On the 27th of this month, SHUKUN and Xi’an Gaoxin Hospital announced a formal commercial partnership. On the same day, the hospital president declared that “patients can receive their coronary CTA examination reports within half a day,” while simultaneously launching China’s first CCTA screening program for coronary heart disease. Driven by the rigid demand across hospitals at various levels, SHUKUN has fully initiated its commercialization efforts. At the conference, Mr. Mao Xinsheng stated that propelled by “AI data power” as a new productive force, China’s healthcare development is shifting from a disease-centric model to a patient-centric one. Consequently, medical AI can achieve comprehensive coverage across all healthcare scenarios, enabling industrialized and large-scale implementation, thereby truly accelerating the “Healthy China” initiative. In the foreseeable future, new paradigms of physician work and service delivery will emerge, and the new era of intelligent health management will soon benefit everyone around us.

In May this year, SHUKUN globally launched CareSphere™ Advisor, an intelligent healthcare platform covering major diseases in cardiology, neurology, and oncology. The platform includes: 1) A full-cycle intelligent service platform for cardiology, featuring intelligent auxiliary diagnostic systems for coronary CTA, coronary CT-FFR, and coronary artery calcium scoring, as well as an intelligent auxiliary diagnostic system for aortic diseases. 2) A full-cycle intelligent service platform for the nervous system, covering early screening and auxiliary diagnosis of stroke, and rapid auxiliary diagnosis of cerebrovascular diseases such as cerebral atherosclerosis, cerebral aneurysms, and Moyamoya disease. 3) An intelligent service platform for oncology, including thoracic solutions. Key products have obtained medical device registration certificates. To date, SHUKUN has filed more than 80 core invention patent applications with the China National Intellectual Property Administration.

To deepen integration with clinical practice, SHUKUN has established joint artificial intelligence laboratories with multiple top-tier clinical hospitals. Owing to its outstanding clinical outcomes, SHUKUN was awarded the “Best Case of AI Application Implementation in Healthcare 2019” by the Statistical Information Center of the National Health Commission. By harnessing the power of medical data through artificial intelligence, SHUKUN is transforming the work practices of countless physicians and improving the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of people.