Acting director Horst Hahn will team up with longtime computer-supported medicine researcher Dr. Ron Kikinis in a dual leadership model. Kikinis founded the Surgical Planning Laboratory in 1990 at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and launched the 3D Slicer research platform for analysis and visualization of medical images in the 1990s. He also initiated the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing, a U.S. network of research groups in computer-supported medicine.

In addition to his new role in directing Fraunhofer MEVIS along with Hahn, Kikinis will be a professor of medical image computing in the department of mathematics and computer science at the University of Bremen. He will also retain his position and responsibilities at Brigham and Women's Hospital and commute between Bremen and Boston every two months, Fraunhofer MEVIS said.

The institute said that Kikinis intends to create new synergies by bringing American and European researchers closer together. On the technology side, Kikinis will work on enhancing interoperation between the 3D Slicer software package and the MeVisLab software.