no royalties were ever received means that it is indeed true that the technology of laser imaging for animals was never commercialized.
IMDS has a lot of technology that sounds good. Heck, there is a major university research center devoted to it-- The Beckman Laser institute of UC irvine. But IMDS has no saleable products and have conducted no research in the last 5 years. The last upgrade cycle was in 2007 and was the supposed reason for the last set of clinical trials to terminate.
The product has not been upgraded since. Nor have any clinical trials been conducted. Dr Qi 's paper is from 2008 and IMDS just keep resubmitting it.
This isn't new technology. It's quite dated. The original patent expires in 3 years.