The endowed professorship is one of the highest academic accolades that is awarded by the medical school. Kikinis will remain a cooperation partner for Bremen. He is coordinating the Imaging Data Commons (IDC) consortium in the USA, in which the Fraunhofer MEVIS Institute is involved. The network is working on organizing the image databanks for cancer research so that they will be
much more readily accessible for multicentric studies. Professor Horst Hahn will now lead the Fraunhofer MEVIS Institute alone. He had shared this role with Ron Kikinis for six years previously.