Global experts helping us build what patients need

Prof Freitag has been Optellum’s Chief Medical Advisor since 2020. A globally renowned interventional pulmonologist, he brings over 40 years of expertise in pulmonary medicine. He has held leading roles, including Chief of Pneumology at Ruhrlandklinik and professorships at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Renowned for advancing interventional pulmonology, he has developed numerous medical devices and holds over 100 patents. Additionally, he has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and Tulane, sharing his knowledge and fostering global collaboration in respiratory care.

Prof Gleeson has played a key role in Optellum’s major clinical studies. He is Head of Academic Radiology at the University of Oxford and a consultant radiologist at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. With over 200 peer-reviewed papers, he is internationally recognized for his contributions to thoracic imaging and lung cancer research. His accolades include the Barclay Medal and the Roentgen Professorship. Prof Gleeson has served as President of the European Society of Thoracic Imaging, Editor of the British Journal of Radiology, and Chief Investigator for multiple UK multicenter trials, including IDEAL.

Prof Janes has advised Optellum since 2018. He is Professor of Respiratory Medicine and Head of the Respiratory Research Department at UCL, as well as a respiratory consultant at UCLH specializing in lung cancer and advanced bronchoscopy. After earning a PhD in cancer cell survival, he conducted postdoctoral research at Cancer Research UK. A Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow, he has pioneered cell therapies and led national trials like the SUMMIT Study. With over 150 publications, he also serves as Vice Chair of the National Clinical Expert Group on Lung Cancer.

Dr Munden has collaborated with Optellum on numerous US-based clinical studies. He is Professor and Chair of Radiology at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), where he also completed his radiology residency. A MUSC graduate, he holds an MBA from Auburn University and completed a thoracic imaging fellowship at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. With experience in private practice, academic medicine, and hospital leadership, Dr Munden brings a unique perspective to advancing patient care, research, and education. He is recognized for his contributions to thoracic imaging and lung cancer screening.

Prof Sir Michael Brady, PhD, serves as Chair of our board of directors and is among the Optellum co-founders.
Prof Brady has been a professor of oncological imaging in the Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford since 2010. Before then, Prof Brady was a professor of information engineering at the University of Oxford from 1985 to 2010. Prior to Oxford, Prof Brady was a senior research scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was one of the founders of the Robotics Laboratory.
He is the author of over 750 articles and 26 patents in computer vision, robotics, medical image analysis, and artificial intelligence, and the author or editor of ten books. He currently serves as a member of the board of directors of medical technology companies ScreenPoint Medical BV, since September 2014, Perspectum Ltd, since September 2012 and Naitive Technologies Ltd, since October 2020. He has also served on the board of trustees of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence since 2019.
Prof Brady previously served as a member of the board of directors of medical technology companies Mirada Medical Ltd, from September 2009 to September 2019, Volpara Health Technologies Ltd, from August 2009 to January 2020, Oxford Instruments plc from 1994 to 2014 and AEA Technology plc from 1990 to 1995. Prof Brady received a BSc and MSc in Mathematics from the University of Manchester and a PhD in Mathematics from the Australian National University.
He has a PhD in Cancer Bioinformatics from King’s College London and an MA in Genetics from the University of Cambridge.

Dr Declerck is a medical imaging expert and cofounder of Optellum. He completed a PhD in medical image processing at Université Côte d’Azur in France, after training in applied mathematics at CentraleSupélec. He held postdoctoral roles at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Oxford, where he worked on cardiac and echocardiography motion analysis. He then took on senior scientific and leadership roles at Oxford Medical Image Analysis, Mirada Solutions, and Siemens Molecular Imaging, directing teams that delivered pioneering applications in oncology, cardiology, and neurology, and managing more than 100 intellectual property filings. At Optellum, he served as Vice President of R&D and COO, focusing on translating advanced image analysis and machine learning into regulated, clinically deployed software for cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Dr Kadir is a computer vision and medical imaging AI leader and cofounder of Optellum. He worked at the University of Oxford on the Kadir–Brady saliency detector, a foundational method in feature detection, and completed doctoral research on saliency and image description at Oxford supervised by Sir Mike Brady. He has held scientific and product leadership roles spanning Siemens Molecular Imaging and Mirada Medical, where he served as Chief Science & Technology Officer. His industry focus is translating algorithms into regulated clinical products, including invited talks on moving from algorithm to 510(k) adoption. He is an inventor on multiple medical image analysis patents, covering multi-model detection, characterization, and workflow optimization for thoracic CT. His expertise spans model design, calibration, and deployment for lung imaging, with an emphasis on building clinically deployable, vendor-agnostic AI that supports risk stratification and real-world workflow integration.

Prof Zisserman is the Royal Society Research Professor of Computer Vision Engineering at the University of Oxford and a research leader at Google DeepMind. He is one of the principal architects of modern computer vision, known for foundational work in multiple view geometry. His group’s deep learning research produced the VGG family of convolutional networks that helped set early benchmarks for image recognition and transfer learning, and his current work spans large-scale machine learning for visual understanding. He cofounded Vision Factory, an Oxford spin-out focused on deep learning for visual recognition, which was acquired by Google in 2014 and integrated into Google DeepMind. His recognition includes election to the Royal Society, the Royal Society Milner Award, and the Royal Society Bakerian Medal and Lecture. He is the only person to have won the Marr Prize three times (the ICCV best paper award and one of the field’s highest honors).