3D bioprinting and AI help treat diabetes feet, osteoarthritis

ROKIT Healthcare, a South Korean company specialising in bio health care, has announced it will provide a hyper-personalised medical platform that uses 3D bioprinting and AI technology built on Google Cloud to innovate the treatment of osteoarthritis and diabetes feet (diabetic foot lesion ulcer).

The company’s AI solution recognises the affected area of the patient, using computer vision and deep-learning technology, and then outputs a patch with the same size and shape as the affected area to a 3D printer. The goal for this platform is to increase the treatment rate for chronic and complex diseases, improve access to medically underprivileged areas and lower medical expenses.

ROKIT Healthcare moved its existing infrastructure to Google Cloud and used Google Cloud’s AI tools to expand its medical platform and other solutions. The company has thus established a system that can expand and operate medical platforms in various regions using Google Cloud’s scalable, high-performance load-balancing service Cloud Load Balancing and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which provide a fully managed Kubernetes service.

The efficient Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) environment is another reason why ROKIT Healthcare chose Google Cloud. ROKIT Healthcare can now more quickly build, deploy and scale machine-learning models by using Google Cloud’s integrated AI platform, Vertex AI, and serverless multi-cloud data warehouse, BigQuery.

In addition, ROKIT Healthcare strengthened the security of its medical platform by introducing Google Cloud’s network security solution Cloud Armor, which protects applications and services from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using machine-learning technology. Moreover, it deployed VPC Service Control, a managed networking functionality for Google Cloud resources, to mitigate the risk of data exfiltration by allowing only authorised networks to access sensitive information.

Currently, ROKIT Healthcare has signed 10-year contracts with its customers worth around $2.7 billion in 20 countries around the world, increasing the number of countries in which it operates, such as Dubai in 2021 and Brazil, Malaysia and India in the first half of 2022. The company is already in the process of treating patients through cloud-based telemedicine in countries that it has entered and plans to further advance and expand in the global market.

“This cooperation with ROKIT is very meaningful in that the company will be able to provide innovative treatment solutions for chronic diseases that have not previously been treated sufficiently,” said Andrew Chang, Managing Director of Google Cloud Korea. “I’m pleased that we can help increase the reliability and scalability of ROKIT Healthcare’s medical platform with Google Cloud solutions, including Vertex AI.”

You Seok-hwan, CEO of ROKIT Healthcare, added, “We are confident that ROKIT Healthcare has introduced a leading system in the field of personalised regeneration including skin and cartilage. Through this cooperation with Google Cloud, ROKIT Healthcare expects to realise its vision to transform the medical paradigm more quickly. ROKIT Healthcare will build a medical platform that can tap the collective intelligence of doctors all over the world and quickly spread solutions that can cure disease in a short time at a low cost.”

Image caption: Scene of the surgical treatment using Google Cloud and ROKIT AI organ regeneration platform.

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