Accepting the award on behalf of Arterys is Julia Geer shown with SIIM Chair Dr. Paul Nagy (left), and Innovation Challenge Co-Chair Dr. Ram Chadalavada (right)
July 19, 2017 — During the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) 2017 general closing session held in Pittsburgh, Fabien Beckers, Ph.D., CEO, and founder of Arterys, and his team, were awarded the $10,000 Innovation Challenge grand prize. Arterys was awarded for the project, Intelligent Imaging Platform Supporting Translational Research and New Product Creation. The project addresses the need for simple, comprehensive, quantitative and repeatable imaging that demonstrates the power of cloud medical imaging analytics to enable big data and precision diagnostics in the areas of oncology, cardiology and neurodegenerative diseases.
Arterys' plan is to create a cloud platform to both aggregate data and deliver accurate, advanced analytics that will help quantify images in a far more consistent fashion, all while ensuring protected health information (PHI) is secure. Access to SIIM was considered critical for the acceleration of growth and expansion into new partnerships that can augment the value they create.
"The SIIM innovation challenge exposed us to the top thought leaders in the space, and gave us a lot of visibility with potential partners and customers. The experience of meeting other entrepreneurs doing interesting work was also a highlight of the experience," said Carla Leibowitz, head of strategy and marketing for Arterys.
The SIIM Innovation Challenge provides a $10,000 prize to support innovation, exploration and development of solutions that will help shape the present and future of imaging informatics. Ideas for software, apps, hardware or other informatics technologies that solve a specific challenge in imaging informatics were submitted. The Arterys project was one of seven semi-finalist projects featured in the Science and Innovation Pavilion throughout the SIIM 2017 Annual Meeting, June 1-3 in Pittsburgh. Arterys was selected as one of four finalists who pitched their projects to a panel of judges representing the fields of clinical medicine, informatics, business and finance.
Arterys will use the $10,000 award on curating datasets to build new algorithms. Two key factors in developing accurate, useful artificial intelligence tools is having datasets that are representative of the range of scans the product will encounter; images from different scanners in different settings that are also well-curated, ideally with two or more annotators who are highly experienced in the space.
The Arterys team will present their progress to the SIIM Board of Directors and the 2018 Innovation Challenge Committee in six months, and report on the project at the SIIM 2018 Annual Meeting, May 31 – June 2, 2018, in National Harbor, Md.
For more information: www.siim.org, www.arterys.com
March 09, 2026 
