Hebin Intelligence: Pioneering a 7-DOF Ultrasound Robot to Build a Full-Chain Intelligent Ultrasound Diagnosis and Treatment Service Platform Covering Scanning, Diagnosis, and Treatment

At the recent finals of the "2022 Straight to Wuzhen Global Competition," Hefei Hebin Intelligent Robot Co., Ltd. ("Hebin Intelligent"), a dark horse in the intelligent ultrasound robot space, beat out fierce competition to win second prize, emerging as a rising star in the digital healthcare track.

Hebin Intelligent won second prize in the finals

Founded in August 2020, Hebin Intelligent is a high-tech enterprise focused on the R&D, production, and sales of innovative medical devices in the ultrasound field. The company is headquartered in the Hefei Economic and Technological Development Zone Intelligent Science and Technology Park, a national-level zone dedicated to building a "headquarters base for technology-listed companies," neighboring alongside leading Chinese tech companies of the new generation such as NIO, ByteDance, Longsoon, and Konsemi.

Hebin Intelligent deeply integrates robotics and artificial intelligence technologies, applying high-precision, low-latency robotic teleoperation and full-stack AI to ultrasound diagnosis and treatment. The company has built an automated ultrasound image acquisition system that meets diagnostic standards, and is advancing a separation model between ultrasound scanning and diagnosis — creating an intelligent ultrasound diagnosis and treatment service platform covering the full chain of scanning, diagnosis, and treatment. At the same time, it is committed to expanding clinical application scenarios for ultrasound, aiming to fundamentally alleviate the shortage and uneven distribution of ultrasound medical resources.

As the bellwether of domestic intelligent ultrasound robots, Hebin Intelligent has also attracted investment from Linear Capital, HSG, and TINAVI, "the first listed domestic surgical robot company," thanks to its cutting-edge technical capabilities and broad industry prospects. To date, the company has completed two rounds of financing, raising tens of millions of yuan in total.

Four post-80s STEM graduates set out to transform China's 2 billion annual ultrasound examinations

Hebin Intelligent was co-founded by four post-80s STEM graduates who have known each other for years — Zhen Liu, Dongliang Cheng, Jing Xia, and Qi Huang.

The Hebin Intelligent team

From their youthful university days through graduate studies, careers, and now entering their forties, they have spent decades rooted in robotics and AI, steadily advancing with refined technology and deep conceptual understanding to chart a technological blueprint. In 2021, the core team led by the four was recognized as a Hefei High-Level Talent Team.

Company founders Zhen Liu, Jing Xia, and Qi Huang all hail from Harbin Institute of Technology. They have led and participated in National Natural Science Foundation of China projects and provincial/ministerial key science and technology programs, and were involved in projects related to China Space Station robots. They possess years of experience in medical device R&D and cutting-edge technological innovation. Among them, Qi Huang's intelligent bionic prosthetic hand was featured on the cover of TIME magazine and named one of the Best Inventions of 2019.

Founder Dongliang Cheng graduated from the National University of Singapore and was formerly an associate researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China's National Engineering Laboratory for Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology and Applications. Having devoted decades to artificial intelligence, he brings profound industry insight and successful industrialization experience. He previously led R&D teams to innovatively develop multiple B2B AI products that empowered traditional industries to improve quality and efficiency, earning high recognition from clients.

Hebin Intelligent emphasizes original innovation and technological independence. Team members' expertise spans medical imaging, computer science, mathematics, general mechanics and mechanics fundamentals, control engineering, software engineering, and clinical medicine — forming a powerful interdisciplinary team bridging medicine and engineering. R&D personnel account for over 80% of the company, driving a powerful innovation engine. The company has now mastered multiple core technologies, holds fully independent intellectual property rights, and has filed for and been granted over 40 intellectual property rights.

Additionally, Hebin Intelligent has established partnerships with multiple top domestic universities for industry-academia-research collaboration, innovating from the ground up at the source of underlying technologies.

The company has also assembled a full-dimensional world-class scientific advisory team. This includes the Chair of the Canadian Computer Vision Research Committee, providing cutting-edge international perspective; a national-level robotics scientist who participates in real-time review of R&D design proposals; frontline domestic ultrasound department heads offering authentic clinical feedback; and industry peers providing dedicated guidance on commercial transformation — all raising Hebin Intelligent's comprehensive competitive moat.

A 7-DOF force-controlled intelligent remote ultrasound robot uniquely based on human arm structure

With its gathering of talent, Hebin Intelligent boasts formidable innovation capabilities.

Just two years after its founding, the company completed groundbreaking R&D on the world-leading 7-DOF force-controlled intelligent remote ultrasound robot — HEBIN-RUS-T7, which in July 2022 passed medical device product inspection by the Medical Device Inspection and Testing Institute.

Hebin Intelligent's 7-DOF force-controlled intelligent remote ultrasound robot HEBIN-RUS-T7

Most ultrasound robots currently on the market have 6 degrees of freedom. Such robotic arms can only reach scanning points in one arm configuration. When blocked by joint limits or obstacles, the scanning task fails.

Based on the structure of a real human arm, Hebin Intelligent designed a 7-DOF force-controlled intelligent remote ultrasound robot, adding one redundant degree of freedom and multiple force sensors. This enables the robotic arm to be as flexible as a human arm, capable of reaching scanning points through multiple arm configurations, improving robot flexibility and reducing the impact of joint limits and obstacles.

"The core highlights of our equipment are reflected in four aspects: flexibility, universality, intelligence, and safety," introduced Hebin Intelligent co-founder Jing Xia.

First, the product uses a redundant robotic arm and high-precision, low-latency robotic teleoperation technology to achieve precise, synchronized replication of expert techniques by the robot. The R&D team also designed a portable expert control terminal, making the ultrasound robot more intuitive to control and expert usage scenarios more flexible.

Second, Hebin Intelligent solved compatibility issues between the robot and various ultrasound manufacturers regarding data communication, electrical, and mechanical interfaces through a quick-change probe holding solution. The product can connect with mainstream ultrasound equipment on the market, eliminating the need for hospitals to make duplicate purchases and avoiding waste of social resources, giving it strong universal value.

Third, Hebin Intelligent reserved AI hardware and software in the ultrasound robot, allowing the R&D team to upgrade HEBIN-RUS-T7's assisted ultrasound scanning and diagnostic capabilities at any time. Much like how autonomous vehicles can be continuously upgraded with assisted driving functions and algorithms, this makes doctors' remote ultrasound diagnosis work more intelligent, while also assisting junior doctors and grassroots physicians in conducting rapid, standardized, and effective ultrasound examinations.

Finally, Hebin Intelligent's product adopts a hierarchical safety control strategy, setting active and passive safety policies at the environmental perception layer, impedance control layer, and human-robot interaction layer respectively, achieving layered safety control to ensure the safety of robotic scanning.

Hundreds of thousands of hours of dynamic ultrasound technique data, developing flexible biological tissue modeling

From the company's inception, Hebin Intelligent has dug deep moats around data, accumulating massive amounts of dynamic data. As time progresses, more data stacking builds even higher barriers.

Based on vast quantities of real data, Hebin Intelligent constructed an efficient processing pipeline and toolchain, ensuring R&D personnel can quickly identify the most critical effective data within large-scale real technique datasets. At the same time, Hebin Intelligent has partnered with experts and top-tier tertiary hospitals across multiple regions — Northeast, North China, Central China, and East China — ensuring proper understanding and application of ultrasound data.

On the software side, Hebin Intelligent established a high-precision robot dynamics model, and developed a high-precision robotic arm ultrasound scanning adaptive force control algorithm by combining it with human biomechanical modeling, enabling its intelligent ultrasound robot to scan as flexibly, safely, and effectively as a real human doctor.

Addressing the core industry challenge of human skin compression and deformation in practical applications, Hebin Intelligent independently developed a flexible biological tissue modeling method. Based on cutting-edge technologies in robotic environmental perception, ultrasound imaging, and biomechanical modeling, this method can automatically and intelligently perform real-time modeling of flexible biological tissue deformation during the scanning process, ensuring contact compliance.

Partnering with Agile Robots and TINAVI to expand more ultrasound clinical application scenarios

From four people to forty, Hebin Intelligent started from humble beginnings and is gradually growing into a substantial enterprise with rapid momentum.

Over two years, the diligent and pragmatic Hebin Intelligent has developed swiftly. The company's first-generation remote ultrasound robot product has entered the clinical stage, the second-generation product has begun R&D, and key technologies for autonomous ultrasound scanning robots and interventional surgical robots have also been laid out and broken through, with significant overall progress.

Moreover, the company has distinguished itself in various competitions. In addition to its recent second prize at the "2022 Straight to Wuzhen Global Competition," Hebin Intelligent has also been selected for the national Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and National Health Commission's 5G+ Medical and Health Application Pilot Project, included in the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center construction project, and named to the 2021 Microsoft Accelerator list.

On the commercialization front, Hebin Intelligent has established upstream and downstream deep cooperation with Agile Robots and TINAVI, with clear implementation plans.

According to founder Zhen Liu, Hebin Intelligent's development strategy of "dual-wheel drive" — technological innovation and market expansion — is now clear, and will continuously push marketization through a "three-step" strategic path. First, continuously recruit high-end market talent; second, fully transform technology into more product forms such as intelligent hardware, extending commercial boundaries; and finally, continue to consolidate underlying technologies and research, further deepening the data moat.