Samsung Medison Brand Guidelines: The 1985 Seoul Venture Behind Samsung’s Ultrasound

A KAIST researcher’s venture.

Samsung Medison began as Medison, founded in 1985. Korean Wikipedia dates the start to 2 July 1985, when Lee Min-hwa, a former researcher at KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and six colleagues set out to develop an ultrasound scanner. The Korea JoongAng Daily described Lee in 2010 as “a prominent venture icon,” and Medison as a once high-flying example of Korea’s venture companies.

The company grew fast. Its own timeline lists a first export, to Türkiye, in 1987; Korean Wikipedia says a factory opened in April 1988 in an industrial estate at Hongcheon, in Gangwon province, and it is still the company’s first manufacturing centre. A colour ultrasound system, Trident, followed in 1995 and a digital system, the SA6000, in 1996. In 1998, Korean Wikipedia says, the company bought an office tower in Seoul’s Daechi-dong, in the Gangnam district, and moved its head office there as the Medison Venture Tower.

In January 1996 Medison was listed on the Korean stock exchange, the first Korean venture company to be, Korean Wikipedia says, and in April that year it bought the Austrian ultrasound maker Kretztechnik, gaining three-dimensional imaging technology. Its timeline records a “Live 3D” ultrasound system developed in 1998; the JoongAng Daily also credits Medison with developing a 3-D ultrasound device.

Bankruptcy, then Samsung.

Expansion turned into trouble. Korean Wikipedia says Medison built a group of some forty companies, which it promoted as a “venture federation,” and was hit by a liquidity crisis after the dot-com crash. The company went bankrupt in 2002, “unable to pay debts resulting from an aggressive expansion program,” the Korea JoongAng Daily reported. During the restructuring Kretztechnik was sold to GE, according to Korean Wikipedia.

Medison then concentrated on ultrasound and left court receivership in June 2006, Korean Wikipedia says; the JoongAng Daily reported that the private equity fund Consus bought it that year. Its timeline lists the Accuvix system in 2003 and design awards in the same period: a Good Design excellence award for the Accuvix V20 in 2008 and a Good Design best award for the MySono U5 in 2009.

Samsung arrived in December 2010. Samsung Electronics bought a controlling 43.5 per cent stake from Consus Asset Management, together with all of the Medison affiliate Prosonic, the JoongAng Daily reported on 14 December 2010, as part of a push into medical equipment. The JoongAng Daily noted that Samsung had named health care as a future growth area, and that earlier in 2010 it had bought a majority of Ray Co., a small X-ray specialist. The company joined the Samsung Electronics group as an affiliate in 2011, the company says; in 2012 it merged Prosonic, a probe maker, and Korean Wikipedia says a second factory at Gumi, in North Gyeongsang province, followed.

Consoles, probes and radiology suites.

Ultrasound and medical imaging makers sell to a small, expert audience, and their brands are built to be read in clinical rooms rather than shop windows. A typical ultrasound system is a grey and white console on wheels, parked beside a hospital bed, with a touch panel, a keyboard of controls and a row of probes hanging from its side. The maker’s name usually sits small on the front or the monitor frame; the shape, the colour of the plastics and the layout of the controls do much of the brand’s work.

The screen matters as much as the shell. Scan screens are typically dark and blue-grey, with the greyscale image at the centre, and makers give their measurement tools, presets and assistant features their own product names. Newer handheld scanners shrink the console to a single probe that connects to a phone or tablet, so the app becomes the visible face of the brand.

Larger imaging equipment, such as X-ray, CT, MRI and mammography systems, lives in radiology suites, where the machine is often a white ring or open frame in a quiet room. Here the brand appears on the gantry, in the room’s lighting and on the operator console next door. Several makers in this guide build dedicated or open MRI and digital radiography alongside ultrasound.

Much of this branding is shown first at trade fairs. The annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago and the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) are where makers launch systems, stage booths and present new software, and both Samsung and Esaote have used them for product introductions. Ownership also changes often in this field: brands pass between state groups, investors and larger industrial companies while keeping their names.

Ultrasound inside Samsung.

Under Samsung the product names changed. Korean Wikipedia says that by 2014 the company was still making the older Medison lines Accuvix, SonoAce and EKO alongside a Samsung line called UGEO. Later systems are grouped by use: the HERA premium systems for obstetrics and gynaecology, including the HERA W10 of 2018 and the HERA I10, which comes with an examination chair; the RS radiology systems, such as the RS85 Prestige of 2020; the V series, from the V8 of 2021 to the V6 of 2023; and portable systems such as the HM70 EVO. Korean Wikipedia dates the HERA WS80A for obstetrics to 2013 and the RS80A for radiology to 2014. The company says it has also added software assistants for measurement and workflow, such as BiometryAssist and ViewAssist for fetal measurement in 2023, and new probes, including the compact miniER7 in 2022 and the wide-band EV2-12 in 2023.

Design awards feature in its own timeline: an iF award for the HM70A in 2013, iF and IDEA awards for the HS60, HS50 and HS40 in 2017, an IDEA silver award for the HERA W10 in 2018 and an Ergonomic Design Award “Best of the Best” for the HERA I10 in 2019, the company says. It calls itself the largest maker of ultrasound diagnostic systems in Korea, and says it brings Samsung’s information technology, video signal processing, semiconductor and communication technologies into its scanners. Its corporate site opens with the line “Life begins with health and happiness based on Samsung’s cutting-edge technologies.”

The company lists its head office in Seoul’s Gangdong district and factories in Hongcheon and Gumi. At RSNA, the radiology meeting in Chicago, Samsung showed a mobile digital radiography system developed with Samsung Medison in 2016, English Wikipedia says. In 2024 it launched theSUITE, an online ultrasound education platform.

For a design guide, Samsung Medison shows how a founder-led venture can be folded into a global consumer brand while keeping its own product families. Compare GE HealthCare, which took over Medison’s Austrian 3-D business, and Esaote, another ultrasound maker that has changed owners several times. For this guide we use an indigo, a scan grey and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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