Ma Chun'e

A female CEO of a medical company focusing on AI technology study applied to heart disease spoke to interviewers recently after her company successfully completed a recent round of financing.
Less than one month after its founding in 2017, Shukun.net obtained 22 million yuan from Angel Investment, an investment platform.
Only one year later, in July this year, the company announced the completion of a 100 million yuan financing.
Compared with other medical companies of the same type, Shukun.net is a relative newcomer. Ma Chun'e, CEO of the company, gave an interview to the media recently to share her entrepreneurial story.
"When we started, we had nothing but an excellent team that gained angel investment," the female CEO said.
There is a notable slogan on the official homepage of Shukan.net: Solve the scarcity of doctors, and make it easier to find a good doctor.
With the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Shukun.net can explore the value of medical big data. At present, it mainly focuses on medical imaging.
However, different from most companies, by avoiding the current hot fields like that targeted lung or liver diseases, Shukun has made the world's first automatic auxiliary diagnosis artificial intelligence product for coronary heart disease, covering the whole process of disease and achieving the leap of the industry from single focus detection to single disease diagnosis.
"Choosing some relatively challenging disease areas to explore AI technology, allowing the industry to broaden its thinking and explore more disease areas," Ma said, was her initial intention of applying AI in the medical practice.
When it comes to cardiovascular disease, Ma cites some statistics: China has 200 to 300 million cardiovascular patients every year, and nearly 20 million people worldwide die of cardiovascular disease.
Unlike diseases such as lung cancer and pulmonary nodules, the process of diagnosing heart disease is more complicated.
Therefore, Ma's company pays close attention to data's value and technology.
Ma and her team spent four months building data centers in Beijing and Shanghai.
Their sci-tech data open platform was launched in October 2017, and the first batch of scientific research cooperation hospitals were identified, including many large third-grade first-class hospitals, which provided many clinical needs and high quality data for the development of AI model.
These collaborative hospitals provide valuable clinical needs and quality clinical data for AI model development.
Two months later, the cardiovascular and coronary CT products of Shukun entered Beijing Friendship Hospital for a clinical test, and in March this year, completed a number of single-center clinical tests.
Their product has achieved full coverage of the diagnostic process from filming to reporting in June this year.
"Now everyone spends money on equipment. Patients pay for scans and consumables when they receive a diagnosis in the hospital, but the value of a doctors' diagnosis is not well reflected," Ma said.
According to Ma, applied AI in the field of medical diagnosis can primarily help doctors to make a better diagnosis faster, but also means that the resources of top experts can be expanded.
At present, only about 600 out of more than 30,000 hospitals in China can provide  diagnosis and treatment for heart disease, whilst most other hospitals do not have a high level of diagnosis and treatment of the disease, and therefore the application of AI diagnosis shows its value in field.
It was revealed that Shukun was also in contact with companies engaged in drug research and development. For some of them, among the 50 million in drug research and development costs, 30 million are human costs, mainly incurred by manually analyzing data on the effect of drug use.
Therefore, Ma believes that if this work can be digitized and intelligent, drug companies can reduce their costs.
Getting involved in research into products related to cardiovascular disease is not easy.
As a forerunner, Shukun found that there was no ready-made path to follow from the past.
But it is also because of this that the technology pit and the huge data accumulated in the new field became the obvious competitive barrier and first-move advantage of the company.
"Starting a business is full of challenges and unknowns, including the business model, but I don't stop doing it just because it's hard," Ma stated.
As the demand for AI talents in all walks of life is very large, the shortage of professional talents often becomes the bottleneck that hinders the further development of AI startups.
However, Shukun has gathered more than 40 world-class scientists from IBM, GEhealthcare, etc,.
"In the course of AI medical, I believe our team is the most capable in algorithm and original research and development, which is why we dare to make heart products," Ma explained.
After this round of financing, Shukun.net will continue to expand cooperative medical institutions across the country, and the company's business model will be launched in the second half of the year.
"At present, the country is focusing on the promotion of the Internet medical treatment platform. We will build the platform together with the government and implement the new Internet model in combination with the country's major special projects," Ma concluded.