After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

Her pure German, with the clear pronunciation characteristic of the Berlin region, flowed from her mouth. There was no translation, no pauses, and it was even more fluent than Hans's previous complaint.

Hans was stunned. His long-prepared discourse on the "industrial base and medical gap" was suddenly choked and stuck in his throat.

But he quickly regained his composure. As a top-tier tech enthusiast, arrogance was ingrained in his bones. He raised his chin, pointing the drawing pen at Ye Zhen from a distance, as if lecturing an ignorant schoolchild: "I am Hans, Chief Engineer at Siemens Healthineers. Madam, I don't doubt that you can handle a scalpel, just as I don't doubt that a tailor can use scissors. But I doubt whether you know what an angiography machine is."

He pulled an oil-stained handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose forcefully, and said with a sharp edge, "This isn't cutting meat, this is mathematics, this is physics! A field completely foreign to you Easterners! If you're hoping to fool a few machines with half a videotape or our sympathy, I advise you to go back now. Every part in this machine represents an industrial barrier you can't overcome!"

The private room was eerily quiet. Only the monotonous ticking of the clock on the wall could be heard.

Thomas was getting restless. He was about to speak up to smooth things over, since the technology in that half-reel of videotape was too tempting for Siemens. But before he could say anything, Ye Zhen smiled.

It wasn't a bitter smile after being humiliated, nor was it an angry retaliation; rather, it was an extremely calm smile, even tinged with a hint of pity.

"Angiostar Plus".

Ye Zhen spoke, accurately stating the model number of the Siemens product. Her voice wasn't loud, but it silenced Hans, who was about to continue his mockery.

"Detector spatial resolution 2.5 lp/mm, X-ray tube anode heat capacity 1.5 MHU, dual focal length 0.6/1.2 mm." She didn't even glance at the paper, spewing out a string of utterly tedious data. "Nominal power 100 kilowatts, right?"

Hans raised an eyebrow, the disdain in his eyes fading slightly, replaced by a hint of surprise. While these data were all in the product manual, it was rare for a clinician to know them so well.

"So what?" Hans scoffed. "Being able to recite the instruction manual doesn't prove anything."

"It doesn't really prove anything." Ye Zhen leaned forward slightly, crossed her hands on the table, and her eyes sharpened. "But Mr. Hans, if I may be so bold, your flagship product, which you're so proud of this generation, only has a maximum C-arm rotation speed of 25 degrees per second. That's too slow."

"Slow?" Hans's eyes widened like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, his messy hair trembling. "This is the current physical limit! It's to ensure the stability of image acquisition! Only at this speed can our X-ray tube guarantee uniform exposure! This is for safety! Don't talk nonsense if you don't understand!"

"No, that's not the physical limit." Ye Zhen's voice was as calm as a stagnant pool, yet every word hit the nail on the head. "That's your algorithm's redundancy."

"Your image reconstruction chain is still using cubic spline interpolation to process projection data." Ye Zhen looked at Hans's flushed face, her voice steady and forceful. "To compensate for the data deviation caused by interpolation, you have to add a lot of smoothing filtering in the preprocessing stage, which directly leads to a data processing delay of up to 200 milliseconds. This 200-millisecond delay is the culprit that slows down the C-arm's rotation speed."

Hans froze.

His mouth was agape, like a fish just pulled ashore, utterly deprived of oxygen. The drawing pen that had been twirling in his hand slipped from his fingertips and fell silently onto the thick carpet.

He stared intently at Ye Zhen, his mind reeling as if he'd been struck by a heavy hammer.

The flaws of cubic spline interpolation... This is a problem that was only recently discovered within Siemens' R&D department! It's top secret! Even spies from rival General Electric couldn't possibly know this clearly!

How did this Chinese woman know?

"If we use the wavelet transform algorithm instead," Ye Zhen didn't give him a chance to catch his breath, and continued to drop a bombshell, "we can directly eliminate high-frequency noise and retain low-frequency features by utilizing the characteristics of multi-resolution analysis. Combined with a special contrast agent injection technique, we can completely eliminate that unnecessary filtering step."

She held up four fingers: "The rotation speed can be easily increased to 40 degrees per second, and image noise can be reduced by at least 30%."

"Wavelet transform...?" Hans's voice trembled, as if he'd seen a ghost. "That...that's cutting-edge theory still being discussed in mathematics journals! How could it possibly be applied to engineering algorithms? How do you choose the basis functions? How do you handle boundary effects?"

In this era, wavelet transform is to the engineering community what relativity is to Newton when he first discovered universal gravitation—a star still hanging in the sky, visible but untouchable.

Ye Zhen did not answer his question.

"Not only that." Her fingers tapped lightly on the table, making a rhythmic sound. "The catheter material you use is high-purity polyurethane, isn't it? It's too rigid. Although it's easy to maneuver, it's very easy to damage the vascular endothelium and cause spasms when passing through those extremely tortuous diseased blood vessels."

Hans had completely lost his earlier arrogance. He braced himself on the table with both hands, leaned forward, and his eyes no longer held arrogance, but rather an almost frantic thirst for knowledge.

"That's to ensure it resists bending!" Hans argued. "If the soft material bends, the contrast agent won't be able to push through!"

"Who says softness necessarily means poor flexural strength?" Ye Zhen looked at him, her eyes carrying a hint of the helplessness a headmaster might have for a struggling student. "If we add 3% micron-sized titanium powder to this polymer and then blend it with special silicone, we can utilize the rigidity of the titanium powder and the flexibility of the silicone to form an interpenetrating network structure..."

This is common sense from materials science twenty years later, but in the 80s today, it was a game-changer.

Hans was completely devastated.

His technical pride and his self-esteem as a top Western engineer were shattered in the face of these precise, even proportionate, data.

He froze for a few seconds, then his hands trembled as he fumbled around on his clothes, finally pulling out a notebook with a torn cover from his pocket and practically slamming it onto the table.

"Wait! Madam! Wait!" Hans shouted incoherently, his pen poking a large hole in the paper. "You just said... titanium powder? What's the specific particle size? And that wavelet transform, did you choose the Daubechies wavelet or the Haar wavelet? The basis functions... how do you match the attenuation characteristics of the basis functions to the X-ray energy spectrum?"

He was like a primary school student who had just started school, holding his homework and staring intently at the professor on the podium, afraid of missing a single word.

Beside him, Thomas was completely dumbfounded. He didn't understand the technical details, but he understood Hans. For this tech fanatic, who usually dared to contradict even the chairman of the board, to show such an expression, it meant that what this Chinese woman was presenting was priceless.

Although Zhang Guohua and Xu Wenqiang couldn't understand the obscure technical terms, they looked at the foreign expert who had been so arrogant just moments before, now groveling on the table like a grandson, seeking advice. They exchanged a glance and saw the shock and relief in each other's eyes.

Gu Zheng leaned back in his chair, watching his wife's commanding presence, his eyes practically overflowing with amusement. He pulled out a cigarette from his pocket, took one out, sniffed it, but didn't light it, only whistling silently to himself.

This is his woman. Without guns or cannons, a few words are enough to make these foreign devils' knees buckle.

Faced with Hans's inquisitive eyes, Ye Zhen did not continue speaking.

She slowly leaned back, crossed her arms in front of her, and relaxed completely, yet exuded an aura of authority that made people dare not act rashly.

"Mr. Hans," Ye Zhen said calmly, her tone carrying both the shrewdness of a businessman and the composure of a doctor, "Technical exchanges also have their barriers to entry."

"Specific parameters, proportions." Ye Zhen looked at Hans, then at Thomas, who looked nervous beside her, and uttered a sentence that felt incredibly familiar yet incredibly satisfying to all the Chinese present.

"That's a different price."