A slightly different type of post today! Inspired by Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega, who writes many of his amazing blog posts for his students, I decided to write about a question that has already come up a few times, and will probably come up again. The question is – where can I find companies who do (medical) image analysis (in the Netherlands)? This is important for students looking for internships, graduation projects, and jobs.
In this post I outline my search strategies to find such companies – especially small ones, which are difficult to find otherwise. These strategies might be useful to you even if you are searching for companies in other fields or countries. The strategies are based on searching online, so they don’t assume you already have a network of people to rely on.
1. Who is advertising for jobs
The most straightforward way is to search for keywords on LinkedIn. If I search for “medical imaging” in the Netherlands, I get a lot of vacancies at Philips and a few at research institutions. There are also several vacancies which do not have a connection to medical imaging.
My intuition is that this type of search would overlook companies that do not have a specific vacancy, but would welcome open applications from people with the right qualifications. The same holds for internships – often these are not advertised on any website, but there might be opportunities if you contact a company directly.
2. Where are alumni working
The next place I’m going to look, is where alumni of biomedical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) are working. Here is a LinkedIn page with alumni of TU/e. I cannot filter by faculty here, but I can enter search terms related to the names of the programs offered, for example, “biomedical”. I can also filter for alumni living in the Netherlands, and filter by date to filter out any current students.
Now I just click on a lot of profiles, if the description suggests the person is working in a company, and screening the companies for doing (medical) imaging. This is quite a time-intensive process. There are many companies that hire biomedical engineering graduates, but that do not focus on imaging. But I did find many more examples than with the first strategy:
- Scientific Volume Imaging
- Cassini
- Zeiss Microscopy
- Vinotion
- Thirona
- Quantib
- Hemics
- Medis
- Incatec
- Lifetec Group
- Scinvivo
3. Who is sponsoring the conferences
Moving away from LinkedIn, a way that helped me discover several companies, is through sponsoring at academic conferences. The first step is to find out what the main conferences are, either from reading papers or searching online. For medical imaging I’m going to look at MICCAI, which has been running for 21 years, but also a a new conference MIDL, which is held this year in Amsterdam.
Now simply search for a “Sponsors” page and you are good to go! Some conferences (or rather, professional societies that organize the conference) also have a dedicated job page, for example the MICCAI job board. Here are the results from the sponsor pages (not limited to the Netherlands):
- Siemens
- Nvidia
- SubtleMedical
- CVTE
- Arterys
- Imsightmed
- Medtronic
- Deepwise
- Heartflow
- Pie Medical Imaging
- Robovision
- Canon Medical
- Change Healthcare
- Semptian
- Maxwell MRI
- Screenpoint
- KheironMed
- Eyediagnosis
- AIdence
- Amazon ML
- Google Research
4. Who tweets about it
Of course this post would not be complete without Twitter! First I’m going to try searching for keywords, starting with “medical imaging”. If I then click on the tab “People”, I see accounts who have “medical imaging” in their bio. This list already includes several companies, for example:
- Block Imaging
- Carestream
- Perimeter
- EI Medical
- Butterfly
- and more
Another strategy would be to look at the who follows medical imaging researchers and companies. The trick is to find an account with not too few, but also not too many followers. In this example I will look at who follows Quantib, a company based in the Netherlands. From the list of followers, I find the following:
These accounts should also give you some ideas of what other keywords or hashtags to search for.
I hope this was useful! Happy internship / job searching, and please comment below if you have other tips!