Shanghai – July 17, 2017. For anyone who once paid a visit to us, you may be impressed by the well-designed showroom, advanced equipment on display, and modernized factory at UIH’s Shanghai Headquarter. All of these do not come from thin air, but from our constant input in innovation and R&D. With the perseverance in self-development and pursuit for excellence, UIH was honored with two Gold Awards by WIPO – World Intellectual Property Organization, which has never been seen before in the industry.
WIPO is the global forum for intellectual property services, policy, information and cooperation. It is a self-funding agency of the United Nations, with 189 member states. One of the main functions of WIPO is to boost economic, social and cultural development through IP. It also provides global services to protect IP across borders.
The 189 member states of WIPO determine the direction, budget and activities of the Organization through the decision-making bodies.
On December 28th, 2016, WIPO and SIPO (State Intellectual Property Office of the P.R.C) jointly conferred the China’s Gold Patent Award on UIH for its development of a new MRI technology entitled “Image Reconstruction Approach of Planar Spin Imaging Sequence”. This is the first time that a medical equipment provider was honored with this award.
The judges at the award ceremony gave high credit to this innovative technology, saying it broke through the technological bottleneck that constrained the MR imaging development in the past 30 years, and provided a new solution to fast MRI that enables elimination of artifact and distortion.
Dr. ZHANG Weiguo, the inventor of the award-winning patent, accepted the award on behalf of the UIH MR team.
Planar Spin Imaging was first put forward in 2003 by Dr. Peter Mansfield, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with this discovery. This technology symbolized the advent of DWI (diffusion weighted imaging), a ground-breaking imaging technique that enables MRI scan to visualize stroke and tumor. Unfortunately, Planar Spin Imaging may be revolutionary, but not very reliable in image quality because noise and artifact are inevitable.
Standing on the shoulders of the giants, UIH explored further to make improvement. A new approach was thereby developed to improve image quality. The noise and artifact in the MR image come from signal interference, so during the scan, the source of interference is detected, captured and analyzed, and then a group of signals totally opposite to the signal interference was applied for compensation. As a result, the interference is offset, and noise and artifact minimized.
Dr. ZHANG Weiguo, the inventor of the award-winning patent, accepted the award on behalf of the UIH MR team.
The second award conferred by WIPO has a tediously long name: 2017 China Trademark Awards – Special Award for Effective Use of the Madrid System of the International Registration of Marks. Despite the length of its name, this award enjoys high reputation for it is the equal of Oscar Awards in the trademark industry. On June 29th, 2017, at the award ceremony co-organized by WIPO and SAIC (State Administration of Industry and Commerce), UIH became the first award winner that came from the medical equipment industry.
This special award was added to China Trademark Award in 2015 to honor enterprises and individuals that make great contributions under Madrid System of the International Registration of Marks. In less than 6 years since its founding, UIH has made prominent endeavors in international trademark registration and management, IP protection, and brand visibility and influence. Up to May, 2017, UIH has submitted 29 trademark applications to 36 member states of the Madrid System, ranking first in the advanced medical equipment industry.
