Impact AI Advancing Breast Cancer Screening with Nico Karssemeijer from ScreenPoint Medical
What role can artificial intelligence play in detecting breast cancer earlier, when it's most treatable? In this episode of Impact AI, we hear from Nico Karssemeijer, Chief Science Officer of ScreenPoint Medical, about how his team is using AI to transform breast cancer screening. Drawing on more than four decades of experience in medical imaging, Nico shares how ScreenPoint’s AI tools assist radiologists by analyzing mammograms, highlighting suspicious areas, and even learning from years of patient data. The conversation explores what it takes to build trustworthy medical AI, overcome challenges with data diversity and device bias, and the importance of clinical validation. To find out how AI is being integrated into real-world healthcare to improve outcomes (and what goes into building a successful AI-powered medical company), tune in today!
Key Points:
- What led Nico to turn decades of research into a breast imaging AI startup.
- How ScreenPoint uses AI to support radiologists in early detection.
- Challenges of working with diverse data from different imaging devices.
- The importance of training models with clean, representative data.
- Strategies for reducing bias across vendors and populations.
- How independent, real-world validation drives trust and clinical adoption.
- Finding a balance between model accuracy and explainability.
- Why domain expertise is crucial for building a successful AI-powered startup.
- Driving adoption in medical AI through clinical partnerships and rigorous trials.
Quotes:
“It’s amazing how much more information you can get out of the mammograms [using AI]. That surprises me all the time.” — Nico Karssemeijer
“You can't just say, ‘This mammogram is abnormal,’ because then [the radiologists] are puzzled. – The algorithm is getting so good that it identifies areas the radiologists would probably not see by themselves. – You have to – mark the area in the exam where a lesion is found.” — Nico Karssemeijer
“It's incredibly important to have enough domain expertise when you start a company, because it's easy to fail because you don't understand well enough what the customer wants [or] where the field is going.” — Nico Karssemeijer
Links:
Nico Karssemeijer on Google Scholar
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