Institute News

As part of the “STEAM Imaging IV” residency program, Turkish artist Zeynep Abes is on the trail of the secrets of memory. At the beginning, the MR image of a blood vessel tree in the human brain appears on the monitor. Sound and music start to play and the image dissolves, forming shapes and patterns that immediately dissolve again and come together to form new structures. The work can leave you spellbound and immersed in an associative maelstrom of organic-looking pixel clouds flowing back and forth. “Moments Within: Visualizing the Journey of Memory” is the title of the multimedia work by Turkish artist Zeynep Abes. It was created during the “STEAM Imaging IV” residency program hosted this year by the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS in Bremen in collaboration with Ars Electronica, the International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen, the School Center Walle, and the UCLA ArtSci Center. In September, the artwork will be presented online at this year's Ars Electronica Festival. At the end of 2022, it will be on display as an installation at the UCLA ArtSci Center.

Bremen will be hosting the prestigious International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2026. Thanks to the successful application made by the U Bremen Research Alliance and the Section for Artificial Intelligence at the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik) this leading conference will be held in Germany again after 43 years. With this, Germany and especially Bremen demonstrated its suitability as an excellent place for artificial intelligence and science.

As part of a strategic funding initiative on artificial intelligence (AI), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [German Research Foundation – DFG] is establishing eight new research groups. One of them is coming to Bremen – the research group “Lifespan AI: From Longitudinal Data to Lifespan Inference in Health” headed by Professor Tanja Schultz from the University of Bremen and Professor Marvin N. Wright from the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS.

More than 100 million individuals worldwide suffer from organ fibrosis, a pathological proliferation of connective tissue in an organ, such as the lung, heart and liver. Hardly any causal treatments are available to date. The unmet medical need is partly due to the fact that the existing disease models for fibrosis research are insufficient and little predictive. Coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine ITEM, four Fraunhofer institutes (ITEM, IWS, MEVIS und IMW) have joined forces in the FibroPaths® project aimed at enabling rapid and safe development of antifibrotic drugs.

The new institute building of Fraunhofer MEVIS opens its doors and presents itself to the public on the Day of Architecture on Sunday, June 26.

Fraunhofer MEVIS participates at the 5th edition of the SILBERSALZ Science & Media Forum taking place on 17-18 June 2022 at the Leopoldina – National Academy of Sciences, in Halle (Saale), Germany.

Fraunhofer MEVIS is well represented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Pathology (DGP 2022) from June 9 to 11 in Muenster. The conference offers researchers the opportunity to exchange ideas directly and intensively after the last purely digital meetings. The motto of the conference is: Connective (tissue) pathology – what connects us!

Diversity is an important asset for Fraunhofer MEVIS, which works with human medical data from all over the world. To raise awareness of diversity and unconscious bias and increase the visibility of diversity at the institute, Fraunhofer MEVIS celebrates German Diversity Day 2022 on May 31 with various activities on site and online.

For this year’s Tribeca Immersive programme at the 2022 Tribeca Festival, which will be presented at the historic site of 120 Broadway, New York, USA from 9-19 June, London-based art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, the immersive production company Atlas V and US producing company Pressman Film present the world premiere of an extraordinary new collaborative virtual reality experience, entitled EVOLVER: a free-roaming, immersive journey through the breathing body.

The Tides Within Us is part of the launch programme for The Reel Store, the UK’s first permanent immersive digital art gallery, which opens in Coventry from Friday 13 May 2022, becoming a permanent new visitor attraction in the heart of the city. To create this project, Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF)—one of the world’s leading immersive art collectives—partnered with Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS.

Under the motto “Research expertise for the healthcare industry of tomorrow”, experts from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft will present innovative research for the lead market of healthcare at DMEA 2022 in Berlin from April 26 to 28, 2022.

The director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Horst Karl Hahn, has been appointed full professor of “Digital Medicine” at the University of Bremen, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, effective February 1, 2022.

Fraunhofer MEVIS presents as a research partner, jointly with Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), and York Mediale 'The Tides Within Us' at SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 Art Galleries. The artwork is an ongoing exploration into the world beyond the limits of our senses at the intersection of art, science, and technology; where does the living body begin, and where does it end? By peering under our skin we reveal the tidal rhythms of oxygen flowing through the branching ecosystem of the human body. The aim is to challenge notions of boundaries between us human beings and our environment.

On Thursday, the sculptor and painter Daniele Dell'Eva, who works in Würzburg, gave over his work to Fraunhofer MEVIS. It was created as part of the “Kunst am Bau” (“Art in Architecture”) competition for the new institute building, the “Workshop of Digital Medicine” at the main location in Bremen.

Prof. Dr. med. Fabian Kiessling has been recognized by Clarivate as a Highly Cited Researcher 2021 in the Pharmacology and Toxicology category.

Fraunhofer MEVIS is delighted to welcome LA-based Turkish media artist Zeynep Abes to our artist-in-residence program STEAM Imaging IV, realized in collaboration with Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, the International Fraunhofer Talent School, and School Center Walle, Bremen, Germany, and UCLA ArtSci Center, Los Angeles, USA. The residency includes a series of online and on-site encounters that bring the artist and Fraunhofer MEVIS scientists together with school students and their families in Bremen, Germany.

On Wednesday, October 6, the virtual kick-off meeting for EsteR, a project aiming to enhance decision support of public health authorities by employing risk modeling for pandemic control, took place. The project started on July 1, 2021 and is funded for one year with 193,000 euros by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the announcement "Prävention und Versorgung epidemisch auftretender Infektionen mit innovativer Medizintechnik".

A virtual “AI Center for Health Care” is being established in the U Bremen Research Alliance (UBRA). For this purpose, the state of Bremen provides funds that are awarded to forward-looking projects in the UBRA. In the course of a competitive call for proposals, five projects were recently selected to receive funding in the coming years. The projects, in which Fraunhofer MEVIS is involved, will start this year.

Organized as digital online event, we are opening the doors and inviting kids and their parents to join a virtual tour of our MRI Center at Fraunhofer MEVIS on Sunday, October 3rd. MEVIS joins the initiative „Maus Türöffner-Tag” by the WDR „Die Sendung mit der Maus” opening doors all over Germany to discover exciting and interesting facts and sites.

During her residency at Fraunhofer MEVIS, media artist Eli Joteva created a remarkable installation: To obtain the material for her digital artwork, the Bulgarian lay down in an MRI scanner for hours. The result: a digital installation called “IntraBeing.“ It shows oversized organs and highly complex webs of nerves that move meditatively and mysteriously right before the viewer's eyes.

The cross-sectoral project, ‘The Tides Within Us’ received an Honorary Mention at the STARTS Prize 2021

Fraunhofer MEVIS is well represented at the Annual Meeting & Exhibition of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) virtually held from May 15 to 20, 2021.

On Thursday, May 6, 2021, the virtual kick-off meeting took place for the BMDeep project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for three years as part of the Computational Life Sciences initiative.

The headquarters of Fraunhofer MEVIS has moved to its new institute building on the campus of the University of Bremen.

Fraunhofer MEVIS is among the winning teams of the call for Ideas & Innovation of the InnoHealth USA 2021 campaign.

The STEAM Imaging III Course was recently evaluated by Dr. Claudia Schnugg, a curator and producer of art and science collaboration and a researcher in the intersections of art and aesthetics with science, technology, and business.

A new consortium of the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) will establish the biggest database of pathology images to accelerate the development of AI in medicine.

The Institute's expertise in digital medicine and the MR-Lab research has enabled Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) to work with medical data at the bleeding edge of capturing techniques.

The December issue of Science Advances contains the article “Breaking Medical Data Sharing Boundaries by Employing Synthesized Radiographs” by Tianyu Han from RWTH Aachen.

Prof. Dr. med. Fabian Kiessling is for the second time in a row in the list of highly cited researchers in the “Cross-Cield” category.