Company leader
Enhao Gong
Co-founder
Subtle Medical
Enhao Gong, Ph.D., is a co-founder of Subtle Medical and its chief science officer. With Greg Zaharchuk, a neuroradiologist and professor at Stanford, he started the company to shorten MRI and PET scans. SubtleHD, Subtle Medical's denoising software for MRI, is meant to produce a clearer image from a faster scan on the scanner a department has.
MRI Research at Stanford University
He studied biomedical engineering at Tsinghua University, graduating in 2012, and worked on medical imaging from his undergraduate research onward. He came to Stanford University for a master's degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. His dissertation is on machine learning for MRI: how the scanner collects measurements, how those measurements become an image, and how to quantify what the image shows. John Pauly, Dwight Nishimura, and Greg Zaharchuk advised the work. An MRI can show soft tissue without the radiation of a CT scan, but the study takes longer. Collecting fewer measurements to speed it up can leave artifacts or an over-smoothed image. That was the problem the dissertation took up.
Building Subtle Medical
He was studying under Zaharchuk when they started Subtle Medical at the end of 2017, which later joined StartX, Stanford's startup program. "In the past, Stanford researchers usually licensed technology to big players in medical imaging. However, since we believe we should try a new framework, we decided to do it ourselves," he said. SubtleHD for MRI denoises and sharpens the image so the scan can run faster. That path can cut scan time by as much as 80 percent. SubtleSYNTH produces extra MRI contrasts, including a STIR series, a fluid-sensitive view that usually needs a scan of its own. SubtleALIGN lines up brain MRI studies so the person reading them spends less time adjusting each one by hand. By 2026 the software was on more than 1,300 scanners.
His work has included a Forbes 30 Under 30 award. He was chief executive until June 2, 2026, when Subtle Medical appointed Ohad Arazi chief executive. Gong became chief science officer and president of the company's China operations, and he still leads the scientific work.