LinkingMed Secures RMB 12 Million in Angel Funding to Advance AI and Big Data Applications in Radiation Oncology

In December 2016, Lianxin Medical secured RMB 12 million in angel-round financing, with investors including CAS Capital, Anlong Fund, and Xike Angel Fund.. VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that the funding will continue to be used for the application of artificial intelligence and big data in radiation oncology.

“Unlike the applications of general AI and big data companies in the field of oncology,Lianxin Medical focuses not on medical diagnosis but on radiotherapy treatment plans for tumors, aiming to improve cancer cure rates by providing more precise, intelligent, and efficient personalized clinical radiotherapy solutions.“, thereby reducing radiation-induced damage to normal tissues and ultimately extending the lives of cancer patients.” This is a point that Zhang Hua, founder of Lianxin Medical, consistently emphasized during an interview with reporters. How is Lianxin Medical strategizing its expansion in the healthcare landscape?

The entrepreneurial story of founder Zhang Hua is quite remarkable.

Zhang Hua, Founder of Lianxin Medical

Zhang Hua majored in English at Southeast University. During his undergraduate studies, he founded a company to develop a bus management system for Nanjing Bus ACCOR. However, lacking technical expertise, he struggled to communicate effectively with the technical team on product matters, despite hiring a group of skilled technicians. Consequently, this entrepreneurial venture ultimately failed to achieve its desired outcomes. To address his technical shortcomings, he decided to pursue a graduate degree at the School of Software of Southeast University.

During his graduate studies, Zhang Hua’s supervisor, Professor Zheng Wenming, was a leading expert in artificial intelligence and computer vision, having received the “Jiangsu Province Distinguished Young Scholar” award and the inaugural Microsoft Research Fellowship. In 2007, Zhang Hua joined the Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia to conduct research on face recognition.

During a visit to the college by Professor Anton Nijholt from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, Zhang Hua, as the student with the strongest English proficiency in the School of Software, successfully handled all reception duties. Throughout the visit, Zhang Hua demonstrated his expertise and insights in the fields of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to the Dutch professor. As a leading authority in human-computer interaction, Professor Anton Nijholt invited Zhang Hua to visit the Netherlands and offered him a full scholarship.

In 2008, Zhang Hua arrived in the Netherlands. In Europe, which was heavily impacted by the financial crisis, funding for numerous research projects was cut. However, research institutions in the medical field remained well-funded. Consequently, Zhang Hua enrolled at the Netherlands Cancer Institute to pursue his Ph.D., focusing primarily on the application of medical imaging and artificial intelligence in tumor radiotherapy.

In 2013, Zhang Hua visited the University of California, San Diego as a visiting scholar to conduct research on high-performance computing platforms in tumor radiotherapy, and also visited Stanford University. The vibrant innovation atmosphere of Silicon Valley and the cutting-edge development of computer technology in the healthcare industry further strengthened his determination to return to China to start a business, bringing global top-tier technology to serve China's medical sector.

After returning to China in 2014, Zhang Hua witnessed the explosive growth of the domestic healthcare industry and observed medical data from public hospitals gradually migrating to public cloud platforms, signaling a trend toward greater openness of healthcare data. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence technology has become increasingly mature, with many national major science and technology special projects making strategic investments in the field of AI.

Open data, mature technology, and policy support have further strengthened Zhang Hua’s resolve to pursue his entrepreneurial venture. From 2014 to 2016, during three years of market exploration and trial in China, Zhang Hua discovered that even though computer-assisted technologies could enable accurate patient diagnoses, the five-year cancer survival rate in China remained only half that of the United States.

Additionally, among the 4.3 million cancer patients receiving treatment annually in China, 920,000 undergo radiotherapy. This proportion stands at 65% in the United States, whereas it is only 21% in China.. The vast disparity in ratios ensures ample room for the development of radiation therapy in China, while also giving rise to significant entrepreneurial opportunities.

Thus, focusing on the field of oncology treatment, Zhang Hua joined forces with professionals in technology, marketing, and business to co-found Lianxin Medical, a company dedicated to data-driven cancer therapy.Lianxin Medical leverages clinical data—including medical imaging, electronic health records, and related information—to drive and optimize clinical pathways, ultimately improving cancer cure rates in radiation oncology departments., improve doctors' work efficiency, and ultimately extend the lives of cancer patients.

Lianxin Medical has filed for and obtained four national invention patents, and has collaboratively applied for ten provincial and municipal natural science foundation projects, including three key national research and development programs. Currently, Lianxin Medical’s three major product lines are being progressively implemented in the radiation oncology departments of top-tier hospitals across China.

Lianxin Medical’s product applications are primarily focused on treatment plans, as evidenced by its three core products.

1. Oncology Information System

This system interfaces with and integrates data generated by various independent subsystems and stages throughout the tumor treatment process, enabling control and management of the oncology treatment workflow while simultaneously facilitating quality control in the oncology department.

Treatment Quality Control: First, treatment quality is ensured from a technical perspective. With the application of new physical technologies such as 3D-CRT, IMRT, and IGRT in the field of oncology, modern cancer treatment has entered a new era of precision therapy. These modern physical technologies provide millimeter-level target volume localization, dynamic four-dimensional treatment planning, and dose distribution calculations for cancer treatment. This enables radiation oncologists to increase the dose to the target volume while maintaining low radiation doses to normal tissues, or to reduce the dose to surrounding critical normal organs while delivering sufficient therapeutic doses to the tumor target volume.

Quality Control of Medical Devices: The Oncology Information System provides an equipment management module that enables recording and querying of daily equipment monitoring reports, automatic logging and alerting of equipment failures, and automatic dissemination of treatment machine failure information.

Dose Verification: This oncology information system also incorporates an independent third-party dose engine parameter validation mechanism to ensure the accurate transmission of radiation field parameters. Lianxin Medical employs an independent convolution-based algorithm to establish a rapid dose calculation model for dose verification and control.

Management of Treatment Process: Starting from patient registration upon hospital entry, the system tracks, monitors, verifies, and aggregates various treatment and billing information. A process audit mechanism is introduced to conduct review and confirmation at each stage of the radiotherapy workflow, ensuring effective safeguarding of information input and output at every step and guaranteeing accurate data transmission between processes.

AI-Assisted Treatment Plan: Using traditional algorithms, it takes doctors 4–5 hours to identify the tumor target volume in the head. Currently, Lianxin Medical’s artificial intelligence algorithm can automatically delineate the target volume in just 10 minutes, then automatically plan radiotherapy and surgical protocols, evaluate the simulated therapeutic efficacy of radiotherapy or surgical plans, and provide the results for physicians’ reference.

2. Oncology Clinical Data Center

This is the comprehensive clinical data solution provided by Lianxin Medical.The platform systematically and standardizes the collection of oncology data, converting various unstructured data into structured data to facilitate big data analytics.Enable oncology professionals to collect and access cancer patient data during treatment with the assistance of the Oncology Data Cloud Platform, thereby providing more robust data and technical support for oncological research by scientists and clinical cancer management by physicians.

3. Tele-oncology Treatment Platform

This is a teletherapy platform, not a diagnostic platform., this platform can seamlessly integrate with various existing commercial linear accelerators to deliver more precise, automated, and rapid personalized clinical radiotherapy plans for cancer patients. This aims to improve the cure rate of radiotherapy, reduce radiation-induced damage to normal tissues, ultimately extend patient survival, and enhance the quality of life for cancer patients. For oncologists and researchers, this platform provides a comprehensive analytical framework for scientific research, thereby driving advancements in radiotherapy research.

The functionalities provided by this system include target volume delineation, data storage and backup, cloud computing and sharing, deformable image registration, workflow management, and remote consultation.

Zhang Hua told reporters that, in addition to Lianxin Medical, there are two other companies in China that leverage big data and artificial intelligence to focus on providing treatment solutions for radiation oncology. They areBeijing Quanyu Medical Technology Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen Yinuo Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd.。

Lianxin Medical has always adhered to the philosophy of openness and development, collaborating with other institutions to move forward together. In August 2016, Lianxin Medical was selected for the Microsoft Accelerator program, gaining recognition from a top-tier incubator for its accumulated expertise in applying artificial intelligence to healthcare.

To date, Lianxin Medical has collaborated with other institutions to apply for 10 provincial and municipal natural science foundation grants. In April 2016, Lianxin Medical joined forces with six other leading oncology treatment centers.Participated in the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Major Special Project: “Clinical Application Research on Precision Radiotherapy with Tumor Dose Sculpting Based on Multimodal Imaging Technologies”, the team aims to investigate the interrelationships among genomic characteristics of tumors, multimodal molecular imaging features, and the biological effects of radiation dose, so as to establish precise, personalized clinical radiotherapy regimens that integrate bioimaging with tumor omics profiling.

Lianxin Medical’s products have undergone clinical testing at Sichuan Cancer Hospital, the General Hospital of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy, and the General Hospital of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force,The related products and systems requiring medical registration are currently in the testing phase at the CFDA. In the future, Lianxin Medical will continue to deepen its development of the regional collaboration platform for medical R&D, with the aim of improving the efficiency of radiation oncologists.