- Institute Director
- Professor for Digital Medicine at the University of Bremen
Horst Hahn studied physics with the minors mathematics, computer science, and physiology at the University of Bayreuth, Paul Sabatier University Toulouse, and Heidelberg University, and is the author of 8 patents and over 280 peer reviewed scientific papers and book chapters in the field of computer-assisted medicine. In 2006, he became a deputy director of the non-profit MeVis Research GmbH and was involved in a central role in their transformation into the Fraunhofer Institute for Medical Image Computing (MEVIS) on January 1, 2009, for which he acted as a director since October 2012. He was appointed director of Fraunhofer MEVIS in May 2014 jointly with Ron Kikinis. At the age of 35, he was appointed Adjunct Professor of Medical Visualization and four years later Professor of Medical Imaging at Jacobs University Bremen. In January 2012, he was visiting professor at the Diagnostic Image Analysis Group at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. As of February 2022, he is full professor of Digital Medicine at the University of Bremen Computer Science Department.
He was a scientific coordinator of several national and European collaborative projects, including HAMAM (Highly Accurate Breast Cancer Diagnosis through Integration of Biological Knowledge, Novel Imaging Modalities, and Modelling, EC FP7, 2008-2012) and VPH-PRISM (Virtual Physiological Human: Personalised Predictive Breast Cancer Therapy Through Integrated Tissue Micro-Structure Modeling, EC FP7, 2013-2016), which he initiated. He has received numerous prizes and awards, and finished his PhD summa cum laude in the field of quantitative medical imaging at the University of Bremen, for which he received the Bruker Daltonik special award as part of the Bremen Study Prize in 2005. In July 2011, he organized the International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging together with Gábor Székely for the first time in Germany, and within the 2014 Science Year he was selected as one of Germany's Digital Heads. In 2019 and 2020, he served as co-chair and chair of the SPIE Medical Imaging Computer-Aided Diagnosis Conference in San Diego/CA and Houston/TX, respectively.
His scientific and technological work addresses the digital transformation of medicine based on multidisciplinary data integration, quantitative modeling, and state-of-the-art machine learning and AI methods. The consistent focus on quantification, consistency, and automation in medical imaging as well as the best possible use of all available information form the basis for a new generation of clinical decision support systems and predictive tools for an improved early detection, differential diagnosis, and therapy optimization of cancer and neurological diseases. In face of the rapidly advancing specialization of modern medicine with ever-increasing amounts of data and at the same time increasing cost pressure in the overall health system, his research aims at a sustained increase in efficiency and at the same time raising the quality and safety of both diagnostic and therapeutic processes.