Erasmus Medical Centre
Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC), located in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is one of Europe’s leading academic hospitals, renowned for excellence in patient care, medical education, and biomedical research. The Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine is internationally recognized for its innovation in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, and artificial intelligence in healthcare. Within this department, the Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam (BIGR) is a prominent research group specializing in medical image analysis, machine learning, and data science. BIGR develops advanced computational methods for image processing, quantitative imaging aimed at precision medicine and translational research at Erasmus MC. BIGR’s dedicated infrastructure team supports large-scale imaging research by developing and maintaining advanced data management, storage, and computing systems, enabling efficient, secure, and reproducible imaging research.
Dr. Martijn P.A. Starmans
Dr. ir. Martijn P.A. Starmans is an Assistant Professor at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, leading the AI for Integrated Diagnostics (AIID) research line. He holds dual appointments in the Department of Radiology & Nuclear Medicine (BIGR) and the Department of Pathology (PHANTOM). His research focuses on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into oncology diagnostics, particularly through radiomics and pathomics.
He is actively involved in several EU Horizon projects, including being work package lead in EOSC4Cancer and EuCanImage, external advisor of RadioVal, and part of EUCAIM. Starmans is also a co-principal investigator in the Liver Artificial Intelligence (LAI) consortium, focusing on optimizing MRI-based diagnostics for liver lesions, and similar the Sarcoma AI (SAI) consortium). His work contributes to advancing AI applications in global healthcare, with potential benefits for African healthcare systems.
Mahlet Birhanu
Mahlet Birhanu is a Research Software Engineer / PhD candidate in the BIGR Infrastructure team. She has a background in electrical and computer engineering and specialized in medical image analysis. Together with the team, she has been involved in developing the necessary software and services aimed at efficient the data management for imaging cohort for population studies. More specifically, she has been working on tools to enable federated image analysis on a multi-center population cohort and a developing a metadata model for medical imaging archives for catalogue interoperatability to make medical imaging data become FAIR. She has been involved in numerous EU funded projects (EUCAIM, EOSC4Cancer, EuCanImage) in imaging archive and catalog related tasks and will bring her expertise to use in the AFRICAI-RI project.
Dr. Esther Bron
Dr. Esther Bron leads the research line ‘Neuroimage analysis and Machine learning’ at the department of Radiology & Nuclear Medicine of Erasmus MC – University Medical Center Rotterdam , the Netherlands. In 2011, Esther completed her master’s degree in medical physics at VU Amsterdam (cum laude). She defended her doctoral thesis in 2016 at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, which focused on the development and validation of advanced image analysis techniques for computer-aided diagnosis of dementia. Since then, Esther has successfully built her research line and has been appointed associate professor in 2025. Esther is also Image Data Coordinator at Health-RI since 2022.