Professor Bram van Ginneken - who has organised many of these challenge events - will highlight this approach in his ECR 2021 presentation "Benefits of AI challenges to clinical practice." In it, he will discuss AI challenges and their organisation, offer an understanding of what happens with the data collected, and point out algorithms which won AI challenges and made it to the clinic. In addition, the work Professor van Ginneken and his associates are doing in this field is also enabling the development of other algorithms, often in very specialist areas that would not normally attract the development interest of major vendors. Speaking ahead of the ECR virtual session, he said the challenge events create an opportunity to compare algorithms for particular tasks. With some 150 products for AI in radiology with CE certification for use in Europe, commercial sensitivity among vendors means the content of some algorithms remains unclear, said Professor van Ginneken, who is Professor of Medical Image Analysis at Radboud University Medical Center in The Netherlands.

Huawei's TECH4ALL initiative aims to ensure nobody is left behind in the digital world by encouraging digital inclusion programmes and empowering technology adoption globally. The project is similar to some of the work happening within academia across Europe, where research projects are focused on harnessing technology for societal good. Professor van Ginneken, Professor of Medical Image Analysis at Radboud University Medical Centre in The Netherlands, is introducing digitized healthcare solutions to developing countries and believes that in ten years' time, all hospital pathology departments will be digitized. When did your work in medical imaging begin? I studied physics and completed a PhD in medical image analysis in 1996, developing computer programs that analyse chest x-rays using artificial intelligence (AI). At the end of the 1990s we wanted to put digital chest x-ray units with AI software in countries where there was a lot of tuberculosis, because it accommodates faster, more widespread screening, without the need to develop images on film.