Borns Medical Robotic Inc., an advanced robotic surgery startup company that mainly focuses on AI medicine, has developed new minimally invasive surgical robot with own intellectual property to meet the surgical requirement in China.
Founded by Dr. Yao Li, a scientist at Stanford Robotics Lab., Borns is dedicated to advancing minimally invasive surgical robotics and their clinical application.
The company’s China headquarters is located in Tianfu Software Park and the R&D center is in Silicon Valley. The Borns team is made up of experienced roboticists and scientists from the biomedical engineering field, including the co-founder and CTO, IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. William Levine.
After receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, Dr. Yao Li has worked as a postdoctoral research associate in biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California. He believes “technology empowerment”, especially in high-end medical devices and medical services has made the biggest change in medicine in recent years.
At present, quite a few businesses in China and worldwide, have started utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine. The work is divided into 2 categories: 1. medical diagnosis systems based on clinical big data and pathology imaging science, such as IBM’s Watson and Tencent’s Miying; and 2. medical devices, such as sensors collecting front-end signals for data analysis, high-performance AI processors, robotics, and automation systems.
According to Dr. Li, in every surgery there are huge amounts of real-time data, like vital signs, intraoperative images, surgeons’ manipulations, surgical instruments, etc. Borns robots use these sea of data, human machine interaction, and optimal control, to achieve accurate and minimally invasive robotic surgery. The “surgical brain”, acquired through deep learning, guides surgeons on decision-making and surgical assistance to enhance surgery accuracy and safety.
Medical robotics, including surgical robots, diagnosis robots, and rehabilitation robots are able to maintain finer, more stable, and safer operation for a longer period during complicated surgeries, compared to human surgeons. Surgical robots can also perform remote diagnosis and surgery via the internet and provide treatment to remote areas. According to Grand View Research, surgical robotics owns more than 60% of the market share of medical robots.
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Surgical robots can be further divided into categories such as, laparoscopic surgery orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, and interventional surgery robots. Currently, the laparoscopic minimally invasive surgery robots are among the most popular surgical robots. Surgical robots have performed more than 600,000 robotic surgeries in more than 800 hospitals in 33 countries around the world.
As of January 2016, the global medical robot industry produced annual revenue of $7.47 billion, and is expected to grow at a steady compound annual rate of 15.4% over the next five years, according to BCG Boston Consulting. Worldwide, medical robot sales are expected to reach $11.4 billion by 2020.
North America is currently the largest market for surgical robotics. U.S. surgeons believe there’s a huge market potential of surgical robots, which may increase the market size around 50% in the next 3 to 5 years.
