Where

The Netherlands, in a European and global perspective, is at the forefront in basic and applied biomedical imaging sciences and has extensive expertise both in imaging and in handling and processing large imaging databases. With its varied and well-documented populations and its widely-acknowledged, large  population based studies, it is a center of excellence for Europe. All university medical centers (UMCs) have strong research programs in biomedical imaging, covering a wide range from fundamental research to large clinical and population studies.

Creating a Population Imaging Infrastructure in the Netherlands will contribute to the objectives of the Dutch government with respect to research, innovation, and health policies. It will create an enormous, uniform repository that can be exploited scientifically for many years to come. It will also be of great value to industry and public-private partnerships like CTMM, Ti-GO and TI Pharma in their translation into clinical practice. The Dutch Federation of University Medical Centers (NFU) supports this Dutch/European initiative. In the opinion of the NFU, the Netherlands should play the leading role in the population-based imaging hub of Euro-BioImaging (The European Biomedical Imaging Infrastructure – www.eurobioimaging.eu). The need to organize sustainable imaging infrastructures for European research is well known among and has been explicitly expressed by the members of the European imaging community and European policy makers. EPI2 will be one of the cornerstones of the Euro-BioImaging initiative. Euro-BioImaging is one of only 10 biomedical sciences infrastructure proposals included on the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) Roadmap. The objective is for the Netherlands to host the Population Imaging Infrastructure within Euro-BioImaging. To strengthen its position, the Netherlands needs to expand the research facilities for population imaging with dedicated, state-of-the-art, imaging units, uniform data handling facilities, and processing capacity.