Computer Vision News - March 2022

38 AI for Medical Imaging Compared to working in a university lab, where people are driven by curiosity, a commercial company needs to build a product that people want and are willing to pay for . It must be able to fulfill a proven clinical need and should be able to demonstrate how well it works, that it is of a certain quality, and what its limitations are. In a short space of time, it can go from research and proof of concept to a product that people use , with FDA approval and CE marking. “ What we brought from the academic side was the AI knowledge and a lot of talent, ” Wiro explains. “ My research group was already within the hospital and we were well aware of where the potential was for AI in clinical practice, but we could not do it alone. Quantib was founded in 2012 as a spin- off from Erasmus MC. At the time, Wiro’s research group was working on multiple projects, including looking to develop quantitative imaging biomarkers to make radiology more objective. Several companies were interested in their work, and eventually, Quantib was founded with General Electric Healthcare as a launching customer. Quantib’s first product analyzed MR brain images , quantifying atrophy or white matter lesions to support the diagnosis and prognosis of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia. It received a very positive response from clinicians. “ It’s such a sense of achievement when you get feedback that these tools are helping clinicians in their clinical practice, ” Wiro says proudly. Wiro Niessen is a man of many talents. He is a Professor of Biomedical Image Analysis at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam and Delft University of Technology. In the Netherlands, he works for Health-RI, an initiative to facilitate a health data infrastructure to enable optimal use of health data for research and intervention. Our readers also know him as the president of MICCAI from 2016 to 2019. Wiro speaks to us today about Quantib, a leading radiology artificial intelligence company, recently acquired by RadNet, where he is Founder and Scientific Lead.