SonoScape Brand Guidelines: The 2002 Shenzhen Ultrasound Maker That Moved Into Endoscopy

An ultrasound maker in China’s electronics city.

SonoScape began in Shenzhen, in southern China, in 2002, the company says, and it has stayed there: SonoScape Medical Corp. gives its head office in the Shenzhen Software Park, in the Nanshan district. It started as a maker of ultrasound systems, and ultrasound is still the first product line on its website, ahead of endoscopy, minimally invasive surgery, veterinary equipment and intravascular imaging.

The company’s own timeline sketches the first decade. It marks 2004 as the year it brought out a colour Doppler ultrasound system with a 15-inch LCD screen, says its products could be found in many countries by 2006, and puts the setting-up of offices and subsidiaries across China in 2010, followed by what it calls significant growth in 2012.

Design juries took notice early. The Red Dot award database lists SonoScape’s S20 ultrasound diagnostic system as a winner in Product Design in 2011, entered by SonoScape Co., Ltd. with in-house design. The jury entry describes a cart-mounted system on four castors, with a 17-inch monitor on a pivoting arm and a touch panel, made for radiology, cardiology, obstetrics and gynaecology. SonoScape’s own list of awards adds iF design awards for its S9 system in 2014 and its X5 portable system in 2017, along with several industry awards from the consultancy Frost & Sullivan.

Endoscopy came a decade in. The company says that in 2013 it developed endoscopy and in vitro diagnostic product lines alongside its ultrasound range, and that its HD-500 electronic endoscopy system reached the market in 2016. On 6 April 2017, it says, SonoScape listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, as a company making both ultrasound and endoscopy equipment.

From ultrasound carts to video endoscopes.

The endoscopy line grew quickly in the company’s telling. Its timeline lists a rigid scope with three CMOS sensors and 4K resolution in 2018, and says that in 2019 SonoScape became the first company in China to master the core technology of endoscopic ultrasound, a field in which it says it helped set the Chinese industry standard in 2020.

The HD-550 brought the endoscopy line its clearance in the United States. In April 2022 SonoScape announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had cleared the HD-550 video endoscopy system for gastrointestinal use, BioSpectrum Asia reported on 18 April 2022, with the 550 series videoscopes included in the clearance. The report said the system had been sold outside the United States since 2019 and was paired with a four-LED light source supporting 1080p high definition. Alongside a white-light mode it offers two named imaging modes, SFI, for Spectral Focused Imaging, and VIST, for Versatile Intelligent Staining Technology, which the company says raise the colour contrast of blood vessels and mucosa.

Later systems followed in the same naming pattern of letters and numbers. SonoScape says it announced the HD-580 endoscopy system in 2023, and in 2025 launched iEndo, which it calls a next-generation smart endoscopy platform, and the SV-M4K220, a 4K 3D fluorescence imaging platform for endoscopic surgery. In the same year it says it launched the V20 series, an intravascular ultrasound platform, which added the fifth line now shown on its website.

Ultrasound has kept its own milestones. The company says its X5 portable system went aboard the Chinese Space Station in 2021, the first medical imaging device to do so, and that in 2022 it launched S-Fetus 4.0, an obstetric screening technology built on deep learning, while several of its products gained the CE mark under the EU Medical Device Regulation.

How the category presents itself.

Endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery are sold to a small, expert audience: surgeons, gastroenterologists, theatre nurses and the hospital teams who buy and reprocess equipment. The makers’ public image follows from that. A familiar picture in this field is the instrument itself, a slim scope coiled on a white ground or a rigid telescope laid out at full length, shown with little else around it, so that the length, the bend and the tip carry the image.

The second familiar picture is the operating theatre. Here the product is the system rather than the single instrument: a video tower of camera units and light sources beside the table, and a team of surgeons looking up at a screen rather than down at the patient. Some makers go a step further and present the whole room; Karl Storz, for example, showed its OR1 integrated operating room at the Medica trade fair in 1998, the company says. Close by sit macro shots of instrument tips, clips and jaws, where the detail is the subject.

Much of the communication happens face to face. Makers run training and visitor centres where clinicians handle equipment and practise techniques; Karl Storz says it opened a logistics and training centre in Tuttlingen in 1999. Congresses matter as much: Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in the United States, UEG Week in Europe and the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) are where new scopes, generators and accessories are shown to the people who will use them.

The makers in this guide range from long-established German firms to younger companies elsewhere, and from full endoscope systems to single devices. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made, and it marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Chinese brand with research centres abroad.

SonoScape presents itself as a global company built from Shenzhen. It says it has research and development centres in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Wuhan, Tuttlingen, Tokyo, San Francisco and Seattle, and that its products and services reach more than 170 countries and regions, with branch offices in 30 Chinese cities and more than 3,000 employees. In 2023, it says, China’s National Development and Reform Commission recognised it as a National Enterprise Technology Center, and its central laboratory gained accreditation from the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment.

The brand speaks in several languages. The main website, sonoscape.com, opens onto an English site and offers Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Russian and German versions; the Chinese company site sits at sonoscape.com.cn, and the German site at sonoscape.de is run by SonoScape Medical Germany GmbH of Düsseldorf. The English site carries the line “Unlocking Life’s Potential,” while the German site’s title reads “Caring for Life through Innovation.” Both put product lines first — ultrasound, endoscopy and veterinary on the German site — with customer reports from German hospitals.

For a design guide, SonoScape shows how a company first noticed for the design of an ultrasound cart can carry one restrained, clinical register across ultrasound, endoscopy and surgical imaging, and across many national websites. Compare Micro-Tech Endoscopy, another Chinese company in the endoscopy field, and Olympus. For this guide we use a deep teal, an ink and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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