University Medical Center Utrecht
UMCU – University Medical Center Utrecht (The Netherlands) is an academic, tertiary referral centre. It has close to 12.000 employees and a 1 billion euro budget. Their Imaging Division has a long-standing interest in development of quantitative medical image analysis, particularly in magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography, and a strong track record of public-private collaborations to bring these advancements to the clinic.
Role in the project
UMCU will contribute full MRI data sets for training and benchmarking, expertise in radiology and epidemiology of breast cancer, breast cancer AI and AI IT infrastructures.
Wouter Veldhuis
Wouter Veldhuis (MD, PhD) is a clinical-scientist and associate professor of oncological radiology with long-standing expertise in bringing new technological developments to the clinic: he is the iniator of IMAGR, the vendor-neutral AI infrastructure that brings deep-learning algorithms directly into the clinical workflow in the UMC Utrecht, and that has now been commercially licensed and is being rolled out worldwide (Insights into Imaging 2021). In addition he has developed myBody-myData.nl, a portal that gives patients direct access to their medical images, as well as a platform for creating interactive radiology textbooks at doRadiology.com. Furthermore, he is co-founder of QuantibU a UMCU spin-off focused on development of medical AI algorithms. For the past 10 years he has been the radiological PI of the randomized-controlled DENSE trial providing evidence for supplemental breast cancer screening with MRI (NEJM 2019; Radiology 2021). Before coming to Utrecht he was an Oncologic Imaging Scholar at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, and a postdoc at Stanford University. In 2015 he received the “Wiarda Award” from the Dutch Society of Radiology for Best Radiology Teacher. In 2021 together with co-PI Carla van Gils they received the bi-annual national FMS Science and Innovation award.
Carla van Gils
Carla van Gils (PhD) is an epidemiologist at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, UMC Utrecht and full professor in Clinical Epidemiology of Cancer. Her research work focuses on epidemiological and clinical cancer studies, with a particular focus on prevention, early detection and risk prediction models. In these studies she works with imaging, pathologic, clinical, biomarker and risk factor data, in large national and international cohorts. One of her largest and most recent studies is the DENSE trial, a Dutch multicenter randomized trial that shows benefit and cost-effectiveness of supplemental breast cancer screening with MRI in women with extremely dense breasts. Since 2021 she combines her research position with a position as director of the Dutch Cancer Society.