ICAI
ICAI labs are a concept initiated at the University of Amsterdam to encourage more collaborations between Dutch universities and companies and societal organizations in the area of artificial intelligence. It’s something I always tried to do in my own research group, because the only way to bring the results of our research to the clinic is by working with companies. I’ve seen many attempts by academics to do that themselves, providing their software to doctors, maintaining support for that software, and this tends to fail, unfortunately. Companies have been co-funding my research from the beginning, but the ICAI concept gave me an opportunity to take this to the next level. An ICAI lab has at least 5 PhD students and it’s a great vehicle to showcase your collaboration with companies in your field. When I learned about it, I started talking to the ICAI people and we decided to set up the first such lab in Nijmegen: Thira Lab. It was a collaboration between my group, Delft Imaging and Thirona.
Recently, Thira Lab completed its mission. February 12, 2025, Luuk Boulogne was the last Thira Lab student to defend his PhD. He now works for Thirona, continuing the collaboration with his promotor, Erik van der Heijden, the interventional pulmonologists who came up with the idea to use deep learning to more accurately predict which patients can undergo surgery to remove lung cancer.
The video below about Thira Lab was made by ICAI.
I talk about CAD4TB, papers from Thira Lab graduates Erdi Çallı on classifiers that can deal with missing features, Ecem Sogancioglu on estimating lung volume from 2D chest radiographs, and Weiyi Xie on lung lobe segmentation. The fifth graduate was Cristina González-Gonzalo who defended her thesis on screening for retinal diseases in December 2023. Her studies were important for Thirona Retina, that made a successful exit in 2024. It’s great to see that all of them keep working in AI, and most in healthcare AI.
The success of Thira Lab prompted me to establish more ICAI labs in Nijmegen and in 2023 we managed to secure a large grant to run for four more labs at Radboudumc for the next 10 years.