United Imaging Brand Guidelines: Shanghai’s 2011 Scanner Maker & Its “u” Names

A young company in an old industry.

United Imaging is the trading name of Shanghai United Imaging Healthcare Co., Ltd., usually shortened to UIH; its Chinese name is Lianying Yiliao. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 2011 by Xue Min and Zhang Qiang, both former employees of Siemens, and that it began with private funding. The company’s website gives its headquarters as Jiading District, in the northwest of Shanghai, and its copyright line starts in 2011.

The company describes itself as dedicated to “providing, developing and producing” advanced medical imaging and radiotherapy equipment and life science instruments, together with digital software, for customers worldwide, and says it works through “in-depth cooperation” with hospitals, universities, research institutions and industry partners.

It went abroad early. English Wikipedia says UIH set up an American research and development centre in Houston in 2013, made Houston its regional headquarters in 2018 when it entered the North American market by exhibiting at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), and officially opened its North American headquarters there in 2020. In 2024, the same article says, it shipped its 30,000th system worldwide from its Houston manufacturing facility, opened a research office in Seattle and received its first Health Canada approvals.

The company’s website runs regional versions for China, Japan, Korea, the European Union, Poland and the United States, and English Wikipedia lists a presence in countries including the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, India and Australia.

The scanners and the “u” prefix.

United Imaging’s range covers most of the large modalities. Its website lists molecular imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, digital radiography, angiography, mammography, mobile C-arms and radiotherapy systems, alongside imaging software.

Its naming follows one visible rule: products and programmes carry a lowercase “u” prefix. The website lists software called uOmnispace and uOmniscan, an innovation programme called uInnovation and a magazine under the same name, and the company’s total-body PET/CT system is the uEXPLORER.

That scanner gave the company its widest press attention. Physics World reported on 21 November 2018 that the EXPLORER PET/CT scanner, conceived by the University of California, Davis, scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi and designed by a multi-institution consortium, had produced its first human images. The magazine called it the first medical imaging system able to capture a 3D image of the entire human body at once, and said the images were acquired with Shanghai-based UIH, which built the system and would manufacture it, and with Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai. The project had grown from a consortium formed with a 2011 grant from the US National Cancer Institute; a further grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2015 let the team join a commercial partner to build the first scanner. UC Davis was then working with UIH to install the first system at its imaging centre in Sacramento, with research projects hoped to begin as early as June 2019.

The company’s brand language is short and repeated. Its stated vision is “Leading Healthcare Innovation” and its mission “To Bring Equal Healthcare for All,” and its brand promise is built on three phrases — “Perceive More,” “Provide More” and “Access More” — with the company saying it embeds “aesthetic design” into each of its products.

The imaging trade.

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.

A listing in Shanghai, a base in Houston.

United Imaging became a public company in 2022. Reuters reported that its shares began trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s tech-focused STAR Market on 22 August 2022, rising as much as 75 per cent on the first day after what Reuters called the biggest initial public offering on that market so far that year and the third-largest listing in China that year. Reuters described the company as the biggest domestic player in its field and said it competes with the healthcare divisions of General Electric, Siemens and Philips; it added that the company said the money raised would fund research and development, production and marketing. The offer was oversubscribed more than 3,500 times among retail investors, Reuters reported, and one analyst quoted by the agency linked investor demand to the company’s role in China’s strategy of replacing foreign technologies with domestic ones.

English Wikipedia says UIH has overseas operations in more than 75 countries. It also notes a research partnership with Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, among other academic institutions, and says that in 2022 the company announced the installation of its 20,000th system worldwide, in New York.

Where the products are made follows from that footprint. The company says it develops and produces its equipment, with its headquarters in Shanghai’s Jiading District, and English Wikipedia names a manufacturing facility in Houston, from which the 30,000th system was shipped in 2024 for installation in the United States.

For a design guide, United Imaging shows how a young hospital-equipment maker can build a whole product vocabulary around a single letter. Compare Siemens Healthineers, where its founders once worked, and Neusoft Medical, another Chinese imaging maker. For this guide we use a deep blue, a teal and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep United Imaging’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.