Grand plan

Ryan Zhang CEO & Founder  2019

Years later, when I am sitting in a coffee shop in the Wudaokou around Tsinghua Science Park. still I remember my instructor, Jan-Jakob Sonke, showed me the first piece of image of a patient with lung cancer.

Since then, I have begun to look at the progress of medical technology with a vision of information technology, from the principles of tumors, the evolution of data, clinical processes, to the use of innovative mathematical tools to optimize the practice of tumor radiotherapy. After a long period of time, I was constantly thinking about how to use information technology to create a scalable treatment for cancer until I founded LinkingMed. LinkingMed started from a informationization project, seemingly mediocre. Gradually we accumulated radiotherapy-related target auto-contouring, dose calculation and radiotherapy optimization and other core technologies based on AI, forming a complete product line, also the RT-Viewer-contour obtained the NMPA III medical device registration license.

Since its establishment, LinkingMed has won four rounds of investment, and we have formed a complete product based AI technology focused in the field of tumor radiotherapy. Many friends and colleagues are paying more attention to the next step when they send me congratulations. What is the value and vision of LinkingMed in a long-term way?

To answer this question, I must put the core technology of LinkingMed into a broader time.

In 1896, Chicago, the medical student of the Naiman Medical School, Emil Grubbe, first used X-ray to cure a breast cancer patient called Rose Lee, and this moment is the starting point of radiotherapy with a history of a hundred years.

From the point of view of prescription doses, after the development of radiobiology from the early 1900s to the 1930s, French biologist Claudius Regaud found a standard fractionated radiotherapy treatment plan, which is lasting for 6 weeks, 2.0 Gy/day and 5 consecutive days a week. Until the end of the 1900s, Professor Henric Blomgren increased the dose of a single treatment to 7.7-30 G / day, marking a new era of Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT). Recently, Professor Zhang Yujiao's latest research has further proved that early operable patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) early surgically treated by SBRT have higher survival rate and fewer side effects than surgery.

In addition, the radiotherapy control technology itself has undergone tremendous progress. In the early general radiotherapy, the doctor directly contoured the target area on the film, and then made a lead block for radiotherapy. Later, the Multi Leaf Collimator (MLC) was introduced to form a three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy. Finally, the technique of intensifying radiotherapy (IMRT) was used to accurately project the radiation into the tumor area while avoiding any hurt to normal organs.

Accurate radiotherapy is inseparable from the precise guidance of the ray, and Image Guided Radiotherapy (IGRT) technology continues to improve the precision of the ray in radiotherapy. As early as the 1980s, Professor VanHerk achieved image-guided radiotherapy through orthogonal digital radiography. Professor Jaffery developed a cone beam-based tomography system for the guidance of radiotherapy, which is a good way to achieve three-dimensional imaging and improve the accuracy of radiotherapy. In the last decade, NMR-guided medical linear accelerators have entered the clinic, enabling high-definition imaging of soft tissue and real-time image guidance.

In general, in the past 100 years of radiotherapy, we have constructed a complete set of clinical processes and matching industrial systems from the aspects of cognition, controlling and guidance of the ray. A standard radiotherapy procedure includes steps such as patient registration, simulated positioning, organ cntouring, radiotherapy planning, quality control, treatment implementation, and follow-up tracking. The development opportunity of linkingMed is to replace the mechanical behavior of people in the whole process through subversive AI technology, and improve the quality and efficiency of the treatment.

Our goal is to create innovative clinical processes based on AI technology that ultimately form a highly automated radiotherapy system and a totally new radiotherapy scene.

Imagine that one day in 2025, when the patient enters the new radiotherapy scene, the AI system will automatically identify the patient and match the relevant clinical data to guide the patient to the appropriate position. The treatment device will directly capture the patient's current image and send the image to the radiotherapy planning center 1000 km away. The AI system of the radiotherapy center will automatically process and generate a treatment plan that can be executed, and will be approved by the doctor on duty that day. Then the treatment plan is passed back to the device for treatment, and the real-time imaging system adjusts the precise execution of the radiotherapy vision based on the patient's respiratory motion.

Achieving the above scenario will bring about a series of changes in the entire radiotherapy industry:

1· Traditionally, the importance of analog positioning based on CT/MR is reduced;

2· The work of the doser to plan the design will be replaced by artificial intelligence;

3· The threshold for the development of radiotherapy plans is reduced, and the core competence of radiotherapy doctors is shifted from target area and prescription to comprehensive treatment combined with other treatment methods;

4· Due to better use of stereotactic radiotherapy, the treatment is reduced from seven weeks to seven days, and patient comfort is increased;

5· The entire solution, highly standardized and scaled;

Our vision is determined to become an AI company with absolute leading position in the field of cancer radiotherapy. And our mission is to make AI for the benefit of humanlity and to achieve safer and more efficient radiation therapy for cancer.

While at the same time promoting the standardization of radiotherapy AI technology.
This is the grand picture of linkingMed!