In the medical AI industry, what characteristics should an excellent entrepreneur have?
Graduating from a prestigious school and mastering general artificial intelligence technology has become the “standard” for entrepreneurs in the medical AI field. These professional entrepreneurs pay more attention to technological innovation; on the contrary, they may also face shortcomings in aspects such as industry experience, clinical implementation, marketing, and sales.
Therefore, in the wave of entrepreneurship in the age of intelligence, there is a phenomenon that scientists who understand technology must be surrounded by professional managers who understand business, making up for the lack of business knowledge or management capabilities of scientists.
Xu Chenyang, the new president of Parkview Medical, is a little special.
He has been working in the fields of AI and medical imaging for decades, and is one of the authors of the pioneering algorithm “Gradient Vector Flow” in the fields of computer vision and image processing.
In 1998, Xu Chenyang co-published a seminal paper on computer vision and image analysis “Snakes, Shapes, and Gradient Vector Flow” with his Ph.D. advisor, Professor Jerry Prince from Johns Hopkins University (as of June 2022, cited more than 6000 times), one of the most cited computer vision and image analysis papers in the world. The original algorithm “Gradient Vector Flow” has also been included in many computer vision textbooks and computer vision reference guides, and has become one of the classic algorithms in the field.
In the following two decades, Xu Chenyang has made many contributions in the industry. He has written more than 80 papers in the fields of medical imaging, surgical intervention systems and computer vision, and has been cited more than 24,000 times. He has become a leader in the field of medical image analysis. one of the leaders.
The papers directed or co-authored by him have won the MICCAI Best Paper Award, the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2015 Best Paper Award and other honors.
In 2015, Xu Chenyang was formally elected as an IEEE Fellow. IEEE produces about 250 Fellows every year, equivalent to 0.1% of the total number of members. At that time, medical image analysis was not as popular as it is now, and it was not easy to become a Fellow, which shows his profound academic attainments.
At the same time, he is also an enterprise manager who has worked in the industrial giant Siemens for nearly 20 years and has experience in management and investment in high-tech industries such as AI and big data.
In 2009, Xu Chenyang served as the Chief Technology Officer of Siemens Silicon Valley Innovation Center. In 2010, he was promoted to general manager, becoming the highest manager of Siemens Chinese American positions at that time.
In 2017, Xu Chenyang accepted the invitation of Lu Yao and Shen Shuo, two alumni of the University of Science and Technology of China, to join the newly co-founded Pashi Medical as a director partner and chief technology consultant.
Four years later, Pashi Medical completed the A round of financing of nearly 100 million yuan led by Xie Nuochentu and Philips, and entered the growth period from the incubation period. Xu Chenyang also officially stepped forward from behind the scenes to serve as the company’s president and co-chairman.
He said, “Thank you to Lu Yao, Shen Shuo and all the shareholders for their trust in me, and handing over the next step in the development of Bashi Medical to my hands.”
After taking up the position of president, Xu Chenyang’s work has also become more busy. Whether it is corporate strategy, team building or marketing, he has to be deeply involved. He has invested a lot of energy in many affairs during the transition period. The dialogue with Leifeng.com is also successive. Adjusted the time twice and finally finished it late at night.
Taking over as the president of a startup company in transition is a risky decision. As Xu Chenyang said, “Any innovation of great significance requires the will to continue to tackle tough problems. I am a person who is aware of risks and opportunities. From this moment on, I will lead Bashi Medical to complete more enterprises. goals and mission of the times.”
From behind the scenes to the front, the new president takes the helm of Parkview
Xu Chenyang studied at the University of Science and Technology of China, and the University of Science and Technology of China occupies half of the domestic AI entrepreneurship.
Whether in well-known artificial intelligence companies or research institutions, or in the fields of machine vision and AI chips that have developed rapidly in recent years, there are active alumni of the University of Science and Technology of China: Zhang Yaqin, global senior vice president of Microsoft, Tang Xiaoou, founder of SenseTime, iFLYTEK Founder Liu Qingfeng, Yuncong Technology founder Zhou Xi, Cambrian founders Chen Tianshi and Chen Yunji brothers, and so on.
When he was in the third year of undergraduate at the University of Science and Technology of China, Xu Chenyang entered the laboratory of Professor Chen Guoliang, a master of parallel neural networks in China and later an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and began to study and research the basic theory of artificial intelligence.
In 1993, Xu Chenyang successfully entered Johns Hopkins University with his excellent grades and graduation thesis at the University of Science and Technology of China, where he studied for a master’s degree and a doctorate degree in electrical and computer engineering. During this period, he studied with Professor Jerry Prince, a master of computer vision and medical imaging.
Among American colleges and universities, Johns Hopkins University has long enjoyed a high reputation. Its medical school and public health school have not only been established for the longest time, but have also maintained a leading position in the United States and even the world in many related disciplines. status.
In addition, Johns Hopkins University is widely regarded as one of the top robotics research institutions in the world, ranking first in medical robotics.
Going back in time to more than 20 years ago, the millennium at the turn of the century is of great significance to Xu Chenyang. This year, he left Johns Hopkins University to work at Siemens.
This is also a watershed for him to enter the industrial world from academia.
Since then, Xu Chenyang has successively served as the co-founder, technical leader and director of the Interventional Imaging Laboratory of Siemens Research USA, the co-founding director of the Siemens China Medical Imaging Verification and Application Center, and the CTO and general manager of the Siemens Silicon Valley Innovation Center.
In the past two decades, more than a dozen medical artificial intelligence products led by Xu Chenyang have generated billions of dollars in new sales for Siemens and its business partners, and served millions of patients worldwide, involving oncology, Cardiovascular, neurointervention and many other fields.
CartoMerge®, the world’s first commercial artificial intelligence 3D cardiac image-guided mapping system jointly developed by Siemens and Johnson & Johnson, is one of them.
After being promoted to Chief Technology Officer and General Manager of Siemens Silicon Valley Innovation Center, Xu Chenyang became the highest-ranking manager among Chinese-Americans at Siemens, leading the center to provide new business for nearly 100 high-tech start-ups in the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and Israel, etc. Incubation, acceleration and capital support to accelerate the development and marketization of new products for Siemens AG’s €80 billion annual revenue business operations across manufacturing, energy, healthcare and urban mobility worldwide with new high-tech products and commercial model.
And Xu Chenyang also completed the “transformation” of his identity and thinking during this period – from a research leader with a technical background to a “multi-disciplinary cross-border” with international top AI medical imaging research, development, management, entrepreneurship and investment experience Innovation” leader.
Therefore, Xu Chenyang’s experience of industry-university-research integration is at the right time for Bashi Medical in the transition period.
After more than four years of research and development and polishing, Bashi Medical’s products have begun to enter the stage of landing and sales. For the current Parkview, how to commercialize technological achievements is a key issue that needs to be considered at this stage.
In the “PVmed2.0 innovation strategy” of Bashi Medical led by Xu Chenyang, the company’s technical product route, organizational structure and operation process were deeply sorted out. Based on the accumulation of existing products of intelligent diagnosis and treatment integration, it focused precisely on barriers. Higher AI tumor treatment track.
He said, “If the company is in the early incubation period, it is usually not suitable for formulating long-term strategies, and the technology, products, and business models are all in the stage of rapid polishing and iteration. In the current growth period, although there are still many uncertainties, team members must be clear Know where the company’s ‘North Star’ is. What kind of company we want to become, we must have a clear medium and long-term strategy to indicate the direction and pace of development.”
In addition, since Xu Chenyang took office as the president, he has continued to introduce management talents and industry experts from many domestic and foreign medical AI front-end enterprises, and plan and implement from multiple dimensions such as team building, product technology, market sales, and enterprise development strategies, and promote the growth stage of Bishi. Medical care gradually realizes refined management and lean operation.
Looking back at Xu Chenyang’s resume, since he entered the industry after graduating from Johns Hopkins University, he has achieved great cross-industry achievements that Chinese scholars in the field of medical artificial intelligence can achieve.
In the view of Leifeng.com, entrepreneurship is a “dance on the tip of the knife”. As the president of the startup company Pashi Medical, this time, he will face more unknown challenges. Because, in today’s medical AI entrepreneurial environment, capital is conservative, landing problems are difficult to solve, and the failure rate of entrepreneurial projects has also increased exponentially.
Xu Chenyang said, “I am a person with a spirit of continuous innovation. Past achievements and labels are only a phased summary of my life, and they are far from stimulating my continuous enthusiasm for work. On the contrary, a road full of unknowns and challenges is what I want. s future.”
He said that he has cooperated with nearly 100 global startup companies from all walks of life, and helped these companies grow through investment and cooperation, “I have seen many startup companies around the world that have collapsed due to various problems. We are well prepared for the risks and opportunities we face.”
Therefore, taking over Bai Shi is the result of Xu Chenyang’s careful consideration: he has the determination and courage to face difficulties.
First of all, when Parkview was founded five years ago, it was at the time of the AI boom both domestically and internationally, standing on the cusp of the times.
Second, the advanced nature of new AI technology will bring revolutionary changes in all walks of life, gradually replacing outdated solutions in many scenarios, especially in the medical field.
The third is the confidence that the company itself brought him. Xu Chenyang has been supporting the company’s growth behind the scenes since its establishment, helping the company to lay a solid foundation. The three partners have the same goals and common ideals for the company’s development.
Rich experience also makes Xu Chenyang different from other leaders of start-up companies, and makes Xu Chenyang have a “multi-dimensional and multi-threaded thinking”, which is like Zhou Botong, the “Zhong Shentong” in Jin Yong’s martial arts novels, after integrating various martial arts , and created the “left-right mutual fighting technique” for galloping in the martial arts.
He admits that although he comes from a technical background, he also has rich business experience. Today, he actually has cross-border thinking and ability, which can be summed up in one word as “Venture Technologist” (risk technology innovation school) – with Technology is the core, creating value through innovation capabilities.
“Technology is developing with each passing day, and in the midst of a rapidly changing business model, leaders can understand both technology and business, and can better integrate the two together to choose the right development path for the enterprise.”
He told Leifeng.com that for Bashi Medical, technology is not a goal but a tool. His task is to connect the innovation chain from technology to business, transform technology into innovative products, gain customer recognition, and create value. .
More importantly, he is optimistic about the development of the domestic medical technology industry in the next ten years, and will be able to integrate the technology research and development foundation of Parkview, the industry-university mechanism that is highly integrated with universities, as well as his own international vision and business experience. The medical career, especially in the field of cancer treatment, contributes its own strength.
Create a world-class business card for AI tumor treatment in China
Due to the particularity of the medical industry, the acceptance of new technologies is often the slowest, the supervision is the strictest, and the division of labor is the smallest. From screening, diagnosis, treatment to rehabilitation, it is a very long industrial chain.
Whether it is Siemens, GE, Philips, Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson, Intuitive Surgery and other companies, even if the company is huge, they only focus on one link in the industry chain, either focusing on the diagnosis process or focusing on the treatment link.
In the early years, domestic startups entering the medical AI industry often had unclear focus, trying to do business in the whole process of the industry chain, so they could not quickly break through the difficulties of product development and company growth.
Xu Chenyang does not agree with such a large and comprehensive development model.
Therefore, Bashi Medical has chosen a segmented track in the field of AI tumor treatment, which is focused enough and has enough room for growth.
Compared with AI screening and diagnosis, the technical threshold of AI treatment is higher, enterprises need to spend more energy, and the industry barriers and value are also higher.
From the perspective of the industry background, China’s current cancer incidence rate ranks first in the world. In 2020, there will be 4.57 million new cancer cases in China, and the five-year survival rate of patients is only 30%, which is far lower than the level of developed countries.
In the next two decades, the number of cancer cases in China will continue to rise, and it is expected to reach 6.85 million in 2040. Cancer treatment will become an urgent medical need in China, and there is still much room for improvement in domestic related technologies.
In the field of tumor treatment, the products of Parkview Medical have been deployed in more than 100 tertiary hospitals across the country, serving the treatment of more than 100,000 tumor patients, leading the AI tumor treatment track.
By choosing the right subdivision track, a startup is the first step in the right direction.
In order to lead the company on the road of commercialization, Xu Chenyang believes that the four Ps at the core of the medical industry must be considered, namely patient (patient), physician (doctor), provider (medical institution), and policy (policy).
Enterprises need to consider the value, opportunities and challenges of all four at the same time.
On the one hand, focus on the present, and implement the existing business model to provide professional support for patients, doctors, hospitals and policies;
On the other hand, to create the future, Bashi Medical actively participates in the formulation of regulatory standards for medical AI products, and uses AI capabilities to support the scientific research work of leading hospitals, empower the digitization of grassroots hospitals, and improve the overall accuracy and efficiency of treatment.
According to the strategic plan formulated by Xu Chenyang, in the next five years, Boshi will focus on the implementation of the two product lines of radiotherapy and surgery in the tumor treatment track, and carry out extensive clinical and scientific research cooperation with top three hospitals across the country to continuously optimize products; Boshi also It will further deepen commercial cooperation with medical device companies and third-party service providers, and establish a product system of AI tumor treatment product software and hardware, full-process solutions and cloud platform.
“Boshi must master the neck-stuck technology and have its own original technology.” Xu Chenyang said.
At the same time, on the basis of the FDA registration and access that has been obtained, Parkview will also carry out internationalized overseas business purposefully. , European and African business development has been planned.
This is where Xu Chenyang can play a greater role.
In recent years, Xu Chenyang has served as a director of the executive editorial board of IEEE The Institute (only 9 in the world), a director of the advisory board of the Department of Biomedical Engineering of Johns Hopkins University, and a director of the advisory board of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of California, Berkeley (the first). directors born in mainland China) and other positions.
These rich resumes fully represent the recognition of him from all walks of life, and it is also convenient for him to carry out more in-depth cooperation with many medical institutions, commercial institutions, and investment institutions in the world, and use the rich international resource network to better help Bashi to complete the overseas market. layout and expansion.
Xu Chenyang said that what Parkview needs to do is to “gather top domestic and international resources to create a world-class business card for China’s AI tumor treatment technology.”
Entrepreneurship is a systematic project
As mentioned above, Xu Chenyang was born in the world’s top medical imaging AI research institution under Siemens. Xu Chenyang was deeply influenced by this company in product innovation and team management.
In terms of product innovation, Siemens has brought together a group of the world’s top medical imaging AI talents to engage in R&D work. Xu Chenyang, who was still working at Siemens at that time, led and co-founded the Siemens Interventional Imaging R&D Group. The team members are located in four US states (New Jersey, Maryland, Texas, and California), together with four Siemens medical departments and four third parties. Companies (Johnson & Johnson, Stereotaxis, Hansen Medical, Mediguide), 12 top hospitals and 8 top universities in Europe and America (Johns Hopkins, Mayo, Cleveland, Stanford, MD Anderson Cancer Center, etc.) The whole process is “top-level configuration”.
At the same time, the team led by Xu Chenyang has also established cooperation with Union Medical College Hospital, Fudan Cancer Hospital and many medical institutions in Europe.
Siemens attaches great importance to corporate management and talent training. Employees who are promoted to management will receive training in all aspects of management and communication arranged by the company.
The 300 members of the Siemens U.S. research institute where Xu Chenyang works come from more than 50 countries, with different ages and backgrounds. As a senior manager, he began to understand the career planning of employees from the recruitment stage: some people hope to use Siemens resources to better engage in research work, return to universities in the future, and some people hope to develop new commercial products through their own technology , so that it actually hits the ground.
What he has to do is to manage according to the different personalities of employees.
At the same time, Xu Chenyang believes that managers should not only pay attention to employees at the work level, but also care about their lives and create a good working atmosphere.
Xu Chenyang has made a lot of contributions to Siemens’ talent training. During his work at Siemens, he established five joint doctoral training bases in Europe, the United States and Canada for Siemens Research and the Medical Imaging Group, as well as three research teams in Princeton, Beijing and Houston.
Among them, the Beijing team is the Siemens China Medical Imaging Validation and Application Center established in 2005, which is also the first medical imaging R&D team established by “GPS” (GE, Philips, Siemens) in China. Those who have applied successful experience to the domestic medical field.
The team members who used to work in Siemens China Medical Image Verification and Application Center have now grown into the mainstay of China’s medical technology industry.
For example, Dr. Sun Yiyong, President of MicroPort Electrophysiology, Dr. Su Zihua, President of Aerospace Changfeng, and Dr. Zhu Lei, General Manager of Mindray Beijing Research Institute, were the outstanding representatives who came out of Xu Chenyang’s Medical Imaging Verification and Application Center in Siemens China. .
After Xu Chenyang took over as the president of Parkview, he also made talent recruitment one of the key tasks in the next stage. He attaches great importance to team building. When recruiting department heads, important managers and some front-line scientists, the three partners must participate in interviews together, and select the people who best meet the needs of the job to manage and build Parkview together.
He said, “A high-quality talent team is the soul of the company. The key task at this stage is to continue to recruit talents in various fields such as R&D and build a technical moat, but also to further expand the marketing and sales team, attract innovative talents, and make products available. To the hospital, complete the commercial conversion.”
Today, this way of thinking and management will also be extended to the work of Parkview Medical, enabling Parkview and its employees to achieve mutual success.
Among them, the open innovation model that Xu Chenyang has been cultivating for many years is one of the important models that he copied to Parkview.
Xu Chenyang introduced that the reason why Siemens has been able to create so many star products and become one of the top enterprises in the industry is inseparable from the open innovation strategy adopted in the process of enterprise digital transformation, which has been used in the industry for more than 100 years in the past. In the traditional management mode of the company, only the recruitment link and product landing link will contact with the outside, and the rest of the links are all completed independently by the enterprise and are not open to the outside world.
However, this model is no longer suitable in today’s network age. These enterprises are also facing an increasingly severe existential crisis, and managers’ thinking needs to be upgraded urgently.
Open innovation refers to selectively opening the innovation chain, and through the cooperation of several companies, they share risks and solve problems.
Previously, Xu Chenyang had cooperated with many companies such as Johnson & Johnson in the form of open innovation when he was doing interventional imaging at Siemens. Later, he led Siemens’ global business in Silicon Valley, and cooperated with nearly 100 technology start-up companies and many mature enterprises and venture capital. Institutions and other institutions have carried out extensive cooperation in open innovation.
Compared with those traditional companies, Parkview has inherent advantages as a new entrant and has an agile and flexible native medical AI company.
Xu Chenyang believes that Parkview should not only develop the most competitive medical AI software and hardware products in the focused sub-segments, but also empower traditional medical equipment and service company partners with AI technology through an open innovation model. Create a symbiotic digital innovation ecosystem and provide hospitals with solutions to pain points, so as to achieve a win-win situation, which will greatly speed up the growth of Parkview.
In addition to the open innovation model, Xu Chenyang also made many adjustments to Parkview.
Many start-up companies invest most of their manpower and resources in technology research and development during the incubation stage. When the company enters the growth stage, this development model is no longer applicable.
Managers need to organically combine technology research and development with products, customers, markets, sales, quality, human resources, financing, company management, etc., to create a value innovation system, constantly discover and solve the existing clinical and market pain points of products, and take advantage of the unique characteristics of the company. technology to rapidly develop differentiated and highly competitive products. At the same time, the closed-loop from product to market is realized at the optimal cost and the fastest speed for verification and scale.
“The development of a start-up company is a systematic project.” Xu Chenyang said that it is necessary to invest not only in the research of high-end technology, but also in completing the work of marketing and sales.
In the eyes of some investors and entrepreneurs, the style of the company’s actual managers determines the company’s genes, and to some extent determines the company’s ceiling.
When Leifeng.com communicates with many people in the industry, they will divide managers into two categories: technical and business. In the early stage of entrepreneurship, the former is favored, which is convenient for showing muscles and finding financing; in the later stage of entrepreneurship, the latter is more popular, which is convenient for making products and channels, and improving cash flow.
In fact, Zhang Ying of Matrix Partners China once said at a sharing meeting, “Born in scientific research or technology, they are authoritative in the professional field and have deep technical accumulation. However, it is often because they came out to start a business relatively late, and they are older than mobile Internet founders. One point. Because of the strong scientific orientation and technology orientation, there will be some inadequacies outside of science. Age and rigorous scientific thinking will also bring about a relative solidification of personality, and it is easy to study and think in a single line.”
“Scientists start a business to a certain extent with cognitive biases, and they don’t pay enough attention to work other than research. On the contrary, entrepreneurs with business or sales backgrounds may focus on business sales rather than technology.”
Xu Chenyang called this situation “technical anchoring deviation” and “commercial anchoring deviation”.
This is the meaning of the existence of the management team. People with different backgrounds and abilities are combined and twisted together to avoid such a one-sided cognition.
Xu Chenyang has been exploring how science and technology can truly contribute to society. He has learned about world-class academic research at Johns Hopkins University, world-class product development at Siemens, and the commercialization of technological achievements at the Silicon Valley Innovation Center. In the end, the sand will be gathered into a tower, and the accumulation of many years will be brought together into the development path of Bashi Medical.
And Parkview Medical will also practice its mission of “making the world no longer afraid of cancer” and the vision of “becoming a leader in smart tumor treatment”, and make contributions to the cause of cancer treatment in China and the world.
For this mission-driven startup company, ushering in a new leader in the new round of journey, the company’s heritage will be more profound, the development direction will be clearer, and the pace of growth will be more flexible and fast.
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