China’s original AI-enabled technology provides “visual evidence” for traditional acupuncture therapy

China News Service, Beijing, October 18 (Reporters Li Chun and Ma Shuaisha) The 2026 World Congress of Traditional Medicine will be held in Beijing from the 17th to the 18th. The new generation AI-empowered living mesoscopic three-dimensional microscopy system RUSH3D-HR developed by a Chinese scientific research team was unveiled during the conference. This study is the first to capture the dynamic changes in cells in remote immune organs regulated by acupuncture in real time in living animals, providing "visual evidence" at the cellular level for traditional acupuncture therapy.

The system was jointly developed by the team of Academician Dai Qionghai of Tsinghua University and the team of Professor Wang Wei of Tongji Hospital Affiliated to Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The relevant results have been published in the top international journal "Nature Biotechnology". Lu Zhi, co-first author of the paper and assistant professor of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Tsinghua University, said in an interview that this is not only a technological breakthrough, but also an attempt to interpret traditional medicine with modern scientific language.

According to reports, the research team used the mouse acute inflammation model as the research object. Experiments have observed that under inflammatory conditions, the number of neutrophils in the spleen of mice increases by approximately 30%, and "clusters" of hundreds of cells are frequently formed, with the frequency of events approximately 10 times that of normal mice. After 0.5 mA electroacupuncture was applied to Zusanli acupoint in mice, neutrophil clustering events were reduced by more than 5 times, confirming the anti-inflammatory regulatory effect of electroacupuncture from the cell dynamics level.

"We hope to provide the most intuitive evidence to visualize the process of cell changes and see that the movement trends of cells are different between acupuncture and no acupuncture." Lu Zhi said that the experiment also found that in this specific inflammation model, the effect of traditional acupuncture without electricity is weaker than electroacupuncture, which also provides experimental basis for the difference in the effects of different acupuncture methods.

In order to capture this delicate dynamic process, the scientific research team independently developed the "Kunlun" large field of view and high numerical aperture objective lens, which expands the imaging field of view to the millimeter level while maintaining sub-cellular resolution. It then integrates computational imaging and artificial intelligence algorithms to complete motion artifact correction, image noise reduction, and three-dimensional reconstruction. The data processing speed is more than a thousand times faster than traditional algorithms.

Lu Zhi said that the imaging throughput of a single "Kunlun" experiment is roughly equivalent to the sum of the past 100 experiments, breaking through the long-standing bottleneck of "the incompatibility of field of view and resolution" in the field of in vivo microscopy.

During this World Congress of Traditional Medicine, this cross-fertilization result provided a new technical idea for global traditional medicine research. In Lu Zhi's view, the core of "modernization of traditional medicine" is to open up a complete logical chain from cellular mechanisms to clinical application, and to find a solid scientific basis for treatments that have been proven effective in practice.

"In addition to acupuncture, there are many traditional Chinese medicine therapeutic intervention methods. You can use this in vivo imaging method to see if you can discover some phenomena that have not been observed before." Lu Zhi said that in the future, the team hopes to expand mesoscopic in vivo imaging technology to more traditional medicine fields, use modern scientific methods to explore the deep value of traditional medicine, and contribute Chinese wisdom to the development of traditional medicine in the world.