Infervision and 12 SIGMA, two Chinese AI medical imaging companies, are racing to rival the same international markets.
Infervision (推想科技), a Beijing-based AI startup using deep learning to improve medical image analysis and help diagnose cancers, recently appointed former GE Healthcare scientist SHEN Yun (沈云) as the president of iCR-inferVISION Global Clinical Collaboration Research Institute. Since China elevated AI as a strategic development plan since 2017, more and more oversea-background scientists returned to China to join the emerging AI gold rush.
CHEN Kuan (陈宽), founder and CEO of Infervision, who himself was a P.H.D. candidate of the University of Chicago, dropped out of his doctoral program after he found the huge opportunities of integrating AI with healthcare industry in 2015. CHEN was right, since been founded in early 2016, his company Infervision has attracted four rounds of funding from various investors, including Sequoia Capital China, Qiming Venture Partners and so on.
Infervision has five products InferRead CT Lung, InferRead DR Chest, InferRead CT Stroke, InferRead CT Bone, and InferScholar Center. All solutions aim to help radiologists to reduce repetitive work and improve the accuracy of diagnosis. Infervision claimed two months ago that the company’s AI imaging technology has been accepted in 200 hospitals worldwide and assists with an estimated 20000 scans for lung cancer screening every day, which made Infervision the largest AI platform in the world (in terms of scan volume) for registered active medical professionals.
Infervision has been actively expanding into international markets in the past year, its Japan and America offices were founded in September 2017, and in March 2018 infervision Europe was launched. “In China, hospitals would like to try new technologies but have little willingness to pay; it’s relatively easier for Infervision to make money from Japan, America, and Europe”, someone familiar with the matter told EqualOcean.
12 SIGMA, a major competitor of Infervision, also takes the same development path. Now Infervision and 12 SIGMA, two Chinese AI medical imaging companies, are racing to rival the same international markets. And just like CHEN, the founder and CEO of 12 SIGMA ZHONG Xin (钟昕), a Carnegie Mellon University graduate who once worked at Qualcomm, discovered the AI tide, back to China and founded 12 SIGMA in 2015.
——Author: YuanPu; Write to YuanPu at YuanPu@EqualOcean.com