Quantib

The SME leading the way into the future of radiology

Rudolf Scholte is the COO of Quantib BV, a company of “young and passionate people dedicated to advancing healthcare by writing awesome algorithms”, as stated on their website, that he and professor Wiro Niessen of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam co-founded in 2012. With over 25 years of management experience in the healthcare industry, he has spent the last ten years focusing on building innovative start-ups.

Quantib began life as a spin-off from the Erasmus University that houses the Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam led by Wiro Niessen that researches the application of new technological innovations for medical imaging analysis. “The unique thing about this,” Rudolf points out, “is that the Erasmus University does not have a specific physics or computer science department and as such is forced to internalise these skills within its medical centre where the physicists, mathematicians and computer sciences among its staff there are geared to medical imaging analysis.” A major reason for the group’s success is that it is actually housed inside the medical centre, working together with radiologists, neurologists and other specialists. This means that the developments are really focused on the clinic’s needs. “Just imagine the benefits of sharing all that knowledge, next to the coffee machine!”

AI +

When General Electric Healthcare visited the centre and saw for itself the work that was going on, it decided to collaborate and become a launching customer for the innovative technologies that were being created. “And so we had a substantial agreement in place to get Quantib got off the ground,” Rudolf explains. “Looking at the company’s business, several buzzwords come to mind, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning – these are the technologies that play a key role in medical image analysis. We all know how AI got the better of the human world champion in Go! Well, we use the same kind of AI to ‘win’ but with an essential add-on – a deep understanding of clinical usage and the clinic’s underlying workflow.” The first area in which Quantib applied this was neurology and in collaboration with GE Healthcare, Quantib™ Brain was developed, an advantage workstation (server) plug-in that offers automated brain structure quantification in a familiar software environment.

Tweak and optimise

Quantib goes further than simply medical imaging analysis – it involves the whole workflow from reading the image to diagnosing the patient. Key to this whole process is software. “Our product is software – data science. We use the software to analyse the data and try to use it in a more intelligent way. It’s not the software and algorithms that distinguish us from other high-tech companies. Where we are different,” Rudolf says, “is our deep knowledge of anatomical workflows, diagnostics and clinical processes. The innovation takes place in tweaking and optimising those algorithms so that they can be used in a vendor-neutral way. The equipment and devices in a hospital are used in various ways and generate diverse output so the difficulty lies in getting the software to work with all the different databases and machines.”