The AI for Medical Imaging Lab (AIM Lab) has been officially opened. The new public-private research lab is focused on the deployment of artificial intelligence for medical image recognition.
The interpretation of digital images plays an increasingly important role in medical practice. However, human experts are expensive, get tired and make mistakes. Computers are able to extract more and more information from images. Due to their increased accuracy, they work more reliably than humans in some cases in this respect.
Adapting for medical images
However, developments in image recognition have so far been largely focused on everyday images. Snoek: "Adapting and further developing image recognition to the characteristics of medical images is a major challenge for the AIM Lab. From a technical perspective, we will work on fundamental and relatively general AI models and algorithms that can be applied to specific diseases."
Seven PhD students will work on projects in the AIM Lab over the next five years. They will focus, among other things, on accelerating Alzheimer's diagnosis, modelling heart movements and generating automatic reports based on X-ray images. The lab is a collaboration between the United Arab Emirates' Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) and the University of Amsterdam.
Officially opened
Geert ten Dam (chairman of the UvA's Executive Board), Victor Everhardt (alderman of the City of Amsterdam) and Xiantong Zhen (IIAI) recently officially opened the new lab by jointly unveiling the AIM Lab banner with the logo. "We are very happy with this collaboration with IIAI, a powerhouse in AI research, and look forward to inventing new technology for medical image processing together," said Cees Snoek, scientific co-director of the research lab.
The AIM lab is part of ICAI, the national Innovation Centre for AI at the Amsterdam Science Park. It is the seventh lab to be part of ICAI. Previously, the industrial lab AIRlab Amsterdam in collaboration with Ahold Delhaize, the National Police Lab in collaboration UvA, Utrecht University and the National Police, and Elsevier AI Lab in collaboration UvA, Vrije Universiteit and Elsevier were established.
Author: Wouter Hoeffnagel
