Company leader
Franz Pfister
Co-founder and CEO
deepc
Dr. Franz Pfister is a physician and data scientist and the co-founder and chief executive of deepc, a Munich, Germany, company whose deepcOS platform lets hospitals deploy and govern clinical AI from many vendors.
Medicine and Data Science
Pfister studied medicine at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned a medical doctorate in neuroscience. He added an MBA in health care management from Munich Business School, where he later taught, and a master's degree in data science from LMU Munich's elite program in the Elite Network of Bavaria.
Before deepc he led several projects that applied AI to medicine, aiming to improve patient care and the efficiency of the health system.
An Early Brain Imaging Model
deepc began in 2019 with an AI system that read brain MRI and CT scans in real time. It was not limited to one disease. It learned what normal scans looked like and flagged those that differed, much as a spell checker marks a word, so radiologists could look closely at them. The work won the 2019 Eugen Münch Prize for innovative health care, and from 2020 the system was set for evaluation in neuroradiology at Klinikum rechts der Isar in Munich.
A Platform for Clinical AI
Under Pfister, deepc moved from building its own model to building deepcOS, which gives hospitals one integration for regulatory-approved AI from many developers. "At deepc, we believe that the potential for AI in healthcare will only be realized if we can bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI and clinical practice", he said in 2024, when the company closed a Series A extension that brought its funding to $30 million.
Users include LMU University Hospital, the Vivantes group, Solothurn Hospital in Switzerland and the NHS in England, and deepcOS gives clinicians access to approved AI for more than 60 clinical indications.