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Mark your calendars! The ODELIA Summer School 2025 will take place from September 16–18, 2025, at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) in Barcelona, Spain. This intensive 3-day event is designed for early-career researchers, clinicians, and data scientists who want to dive deep into the world of AI in medical imaging.

Participants will experience a vibrant mix of lectures, workshops, networking, and hands-on activities in one of Europe’s most innovative healthcare environments.

🎓 What to Expect:

• Keynotes from leaders in AI and medical imaging

• Interactive workshops on federated learning and privacy-preserving AI

• Student elevator pitches and feedback sessions

• Guided tours, tapas networking, and teambuilding activities

• Free participation & CME accreditation (pending)

📅 Event dates: 16–18 September 2025
📍 Location: Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), Barcelona
📌 Register by: 31 July 2025
💬 Language: English
💸 Participation: Free of charge (limited slots)

🔗 Click here for more details and registration

Early breast cancer detection is crucial — and MRI is playing a bigger role than ever, especially for women at high risk or with dense breast tissue. But analyzing MRI scans takes time and expertise. That’s why the ODELIA consortium is launching the ODELIA Breast MRI Challenge 2025: a MICCAI-endorsed international competition to accelerate AI development in breast cancer screening.

This challenge invites teams to develop AI tools that improve the efficiency and accuracy of reading breast MRIs. A curated dataset of 500 studies from six ODELIA partner sites — with varied MRI parameters, protocols, and devices — will be made available to participants. This diverse dataset ensures that resulting models are robust and applicable across real-world clinical settings.

🏆 Challenge Highlights:

• Officially accepted as a MICCAI 2025 challenge

• Results will be presented at the Deep-Breath Workshop on September 23, 2025, in Daejeon, South Korea

• Winners may present their work in-person or online

• A catalyst for broader innovations within the ODELIA project

🔗 Challenge website: https://odelia2025.grand-challenge.org/
🔍 More info: ODELIA Breast MRI Challenge

We’re happy to share that our group lead, Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. Dipl.-Phys. Daniel Truhn, M.Sc., was featured in the latest episode of the podcast Faszination Medizin.

In the episode, he discusses his unique journey from physicist to physician, the rapid advancement of AI technologies, and their role in shaping medical decision-making. Listeners also get a look into how AI language systems are becoming increasingly human-like, their potential to support diagnostic processes, and the future scenarios we might expect in healthcare.

It’s a compelling conversation at the intersection of medicine and technology, and a testament to the pioneering work being done by our team.

Listen to it Here on Spotify 

With the funding initiative “DataXperiment,” the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) supports innovative research projects aimed at reusing or further utilizing existing data and tools in cancer research within the framework of the National Decade Against Cancer.

Our Postdoc Gutav Müller-Franzes’ project CLIMB (Contrastive Language Image analysis for Magnetic resonance Breast cancer diagnosis) is supported by this new funding scheme. The main goal of CLIMB is to assess the feasibility of adapting CLIP for the detection of breast cancer in MRI scans by matching text data from medical reports with visual information from the images.

You can find more information on the CLIMB project as well as other third-party funded project under Funding.

Together with partners from Dresden, Essen, Heidelberg, Mainz, and Munich, the project explores the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the treatment of cancer. The goal is to identify new approaches for improving the treatment of cancer and to sustainably enhance treatment options. The project is initially funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for three years.

Starting on March 1, 2025, leading experts from the fields of medicine, computer science, and biotechnology will collaborate to decode mechanisms of cancer metastasis using AI. The formation of cancer metastases is influenced by a variety of factors, many of which are often difficult to identify. To facilitate identification, DECIPHER-M uses an AI model that integrates various data sources, such as X-rays, MRI scans, and genetic data. This enables more accurate diagnoses, the initiation of preventive measures, and the optimization of treatment options for cancer patients.

At the Aachen site, the laboratory for AI in medicine at the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, as well as the Schneider Lab at the Department of Gastroenterology, Metabolic Diseases, and Internal Intensive Care Medicine, are involved in several sub-projects. The research groups of Prof. Truhn and Prof. Schneider are taking on key roles in the methodological development and clinical application of AI-supported techniques. These include the development and training of vision transformers and language models, the development of innovative explainability measures and methods for causal discovery, as well as computer-assisted analyses, model calibration, and risk models.

You can find more information on DECIPHER-M as well as other third-party funded project under Funding.

We are delighted to share the exciting news that our former postdoctoral researcher Tianyu Han, has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

His dedication, expertise, and passion for advancing knowledge have been truly inspiring. While we will miss Tianyu as a colleague, we are incredibly proud of this well-deserved achievement and look forward to seeing the impact of his future work. We wish him all the best in this new and exciting chapter of his academic career!

Congratulations, Professor Tianyu Han!