UM - D-Lab

Maastricht University (UM) is a top-ranked international university, renowned for the quality of the research undertaken in many areas. UM was ranked 103rd worldwide by Times Higher Education for 2018 with strong scores in research and research visibility (i.e., citations), was ranked ‘6’ in THE Ranking of young universities ‘top 150 under 50’ in 2017 and was ranked ‘7’ in the QS ‘top 50 under 50’ in 2017. Maastricht University hosts 16.800 students in international BA, MA and graduate programs, and 3.500 (FTE) employees. It is leading in small-scale interactive problem based learning. Researchers at UM work in multidisciplinary teams and in close cooperation with international institutes, business and industry. UM researchers have attracted international attention by taking the lead in several large European research projects.
UM and the University Medical Center Maastricht (azM) work together under the umbrella organisation Maastricht University Medical Center+ (Maastricht UMC+) and has three mutually reinforcing core tasks: patient care, research, and education and Training: train new generations of doctors and researchers. Of the eight Dutch university medical centres, the Maastricht UMC+ is the only one that is both a teaching and general hospital. This enables quick implementation of research results into patient care and use them for care improvement and innovation.

The D-Lab is an international group of highly motivated researchers with unique skills under the direction of professor Philippe Lambin at the University of Maastricht. They excel at applying machine learning methods such as deep learning on vast amounts of medical data in order to improve the lives of patients, with a focus on decision support systems and personalizing treatment. Its scientists are one of the inventors of “Distributed learning” a revolutionary Big Data approach for health care and “Radiomics”. The main objective is to build “multifactorial Decision Support Systems” and have extensive experience in transformation of patient data into clinical tools, translational medicine and subsequent entrepreneurial activities, semantic web technology, ethics involved with personal medical data ownership and utilization and in silico simulation of cancer.

Prof. Philippe LAMBIN (“ERC Advanced” Grant laureate) is a clinician, radiation oncologist and a pioneer in translational research with a focus on imaging (he published the first paper on Radiomics and was senior author of the most cited Radiomics paper) and Big Data in health care. He has successfully led multiple multicentric trials (e.g. www.eurocat.info) and has been praised for his leadership. He has a PhD in Radiation Biology and is head of the department of the D-Lab at the Maastricht University.

His main areas of interest are directed towards multifactorial Decision Support. It is from this background that he has a keen interest in the development of Big Data –based health care solutions.