OMI Plenary Meeting in Erlangen
David and Malek attended the OMI Plenary Meeting in Erlangen 2026, where partners from across the consortium gathered to share progress, discuss issues and fixes, and plan the next steps. The meeting hosted at the Digital Health Innovation Platform in Erlangen, featured an outstanding talk by Prof. Bernhard Kainz about the future of AI in healthcare and how OMI can be a great support, not only for researchers, but also a great potential for physcians. The breakout sessions featured intensive and insightful technical discussions, while the individual work package updates demonstrated that all partner sites are progressing according to schedule. A few key takeaways from the two days were: 1) Meeting everyone in person, along with side conversations and open group discussions, led to a deeper understanding of OMI and deepened understanding among partners, 2) key challenges include data and server hosting security, the responsibility and cost of hosting the service and safeguarding the data, and asynchornous updating of the individual components easily break compatibility with other components, 3) despite the regulatory and technical challenges, OMI shows strong potential to enable open yet secure data and knowledge sharing across partners, provided that the necessary security agreements and guarantees are established, 4) the commitment of everyone involved has driven the project to reach, to a large extent, the expected maturity level according to the timeline, allowing actual services to be tested.
Malek Al Abed
Research Associate
Malek is a Research Associate at the University Hospital Bonn under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Shadi Albarqouni. He holds an M.Sc. in Biomedical Computing from TU Munich and completed his masters thesis at the University Hospital Bonn and TU Munich under the same supervision. His master’s thesis focused on image quality transfer for ultra-low-field MRI, with particular emphasis on the Hyperfine SWOOP system. Previously, he completed his undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at Kuwait University and undertook a research internship at Sony Stuttgart as a deep learning researcher, where he worked on audio recognition and human avatar technologies. Currently, his research focuses on the use of medical imaging in radiation therapy (iMRT and VMAT), particularly for dose optimization and personalized treatment planning. In addition, he works on developing an AI service and its corresponding API as part of the OMI protocol.
David D. Gaviria
PhD Candidate
David is currently a PhD candidate supervised by Prof. Dr. Shadi Albarqouni. He earned his master’s degree in AI from FIB, which is a joint program of UPC, UB, and URV. In 2019, he achieved the top spot in the SIIM-ISIC competition for skin lesion classification and has published his work at VISAPP 2023. David has a keen interest in utilizing technology for the betterment of society and intends to make contributions to AI in the field of medicine through his work at Albarqouni Lab.
