Company leader
Nico Karssemeijer
Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer
ScreenPoint Medical
Nico Karssemeijer is a Dutch physicist and co-founder and chief scientific officer of ScreenPoint Medical, a Nijmegen, Netherlands company whose Transpara software reads screening mammograms alongside radiologists. He spent more than three decades building computer-aided detection for breast cancer screening at Radboud University Medical Center.
From Physics to Medical Imaging
He studied physics at Delft University of Technology and moved into medical imaging early, earning a PhD in medical image analysis at Radboud University in Nijmegen. "My background is physics, I'm a physicist," he said.
Building a Detection Research Group
In 1989 he joined the radiology department of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center, where he formed a research group in computer-aided detection whose main application was breast imaging. He was closely involved in developing the R2 ImageChecker, which became the most widely used computer-aided detection system for mammograms, and he co-founded Matakina, a company in Wellington, New Zealand, that measured breast density on mammograms.
Radboud University appointed him professor of computer-aided diagnosis in 2011. He served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging and chaired the SPIE Medical Imaging symposium in 2012 and 2013.
Spinning Out ScreenPoint Medical
In 2014 he started ScreenPoint as a spin-off with Sir Michael Brady, an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford, and with students who went along with him. He was its chief executive for the first eight years. "It's incredibly important to have enough domain expertise when you start a company, because it's easy to fail because you don't understand well enough what the customer wants," he said.
Transpara marks suspicious areas and scores each exam, and in January 2026 The Lancet published the final results of MASAI, a randomized screening trial in Sweden that used it. He left the Radboud faculty in June 2022 and continues at ScreenPoint as chief scientific officer and a board member. "It's amazing how much more information you can get out of the mammograms," he said. "That surprises me all the time."