Winners of the 2026 ITEA Awards of Excellence
September 16, 2026
- SYMPHONY receives ITEA’s highest excellence award for connected healthcare ecosystems
- AI FORSchung is recognized for innovation in AI-powered fiber-optic sensing
Amsterdam, the Netherlands – Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA), a global leader in health technology, today announced that two Philips-led public-private research collaborations have received ITEA Awards of Excellence 2026 for advancing AI-enabled innovation in healthcare.
SYMPHONY received the ITEA Award of Excellence for “Exceptional Excellence” for connecting healthcare data, clinical workflows and AI-supported decision tools through open, interoperable ecosystems. AI FORSchung received the ITEA Award of Excellence for Innovation for developing AI-driven methods to compress and analyze large volumes of fiber-optic sensing data. The awards were presented at the ITEA PO Days 2026 in Istanbul, Turkey.
Connecting data and AI around clinical workflows
SYMPHONY developed a reusable, vendor-neutral reference architecture and demonstrated connected healthcare ecosystems across four clinical areas: prostate cancer, aortic aneurysm, atrial fibrillation and multiple sclerosis with clinical partners including Leiden University Medical Center, Amsterdam University Medical Center and Karolinska University Hospital.
Philips also developed technology within SYMPHONY to automatically segment and measure vascular structures in medical images, supporting the assessment and follow-up of aortic aneurysms. The resulting functionality has received FDA clearance and CE marking and is included in AV Vascular, a part of the Philips AV Cardiovascular Suite.
“Healthcare AI creates the greatest value when it can work with the information and clinical workflows that care teams already depend on,” said Sanjay Gandhi, Head of Medical Affairs & Clinical Partnerships at Philips. “SYMPHONY shows what becomes possible when healthcare providers, researchers and technology companies build around open standards and clinical pathways rather than isolated applications.”
This real-world implementation was demonstrated through many close collaborations including the one between Philips and Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), where standards-based integration was the focus.
“Together with Philips, the LUMC demonstrated in SYMPHONY how vendor-neutral, standards-based integration of clinical data, imaging and applications, including the AV Vascular Segmentation solution, can support real clinical workflows,” said Jouke Dijkstra, Associate Professor, Vascular and Molecular Imaging at LUMC. The project created a reusable foundation for deploying innovative digital health solutions, also tailored towards AI algorithm integration, across institutions and disease areas.”
Making growing sensing datasets more manageable
Fiber Optic RealShape (FORS) technology is used to support medical device navigation during image-guided procedures, generating large volumes of position data that need to be stored and processed efficiently. Within AI FORSchung, researchers developed new methods to make these data volumes easier to manage, demonstrating that FORS position data could be compressed more than 20 times while maintaining performance within the evaluated datasets.
“The challenge extends well beyond healthcare,” said Ahmet Ekin, Senior Designer at Philips. “Fiber-optic sensing is also used to monitor critical infrastructure such as pipelines, bridges and tunnels, where continuous monitoring generates substantial volumes of data. By developing approaches that can be applied across healthcare, utilities and civil infrastructure, AI FORSchung demonstrated how advances in one field can help address shared data challenges in another.
Both projects were conducted within ITEA, the Eureka Research, Development and Innovation Cluster on software innovation, funded by multiple national authorities including the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO).
Additional information about SYMPHONY can be found here: https://itea4.org/project/symphony.html; https://symphony-iteaproject.eu/
Additional information about AI FORSchung can be found here: https://itea4.org/project/ai-forschung.html
For further information, please contact:
Joost Maltha
Philips Global External Relations
Tel.: +31 6 1055816
E-mail: [email protected]
About Royal Philips
Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) is a leading health technology company focused on improving people’s health and well-being through meaningful innovation. Philips’ patient- and people-centric innovation leverages advanced technology and deep clinical and consumer insights to deliver personal health solutions for consumers and professional health solutions for healthcare providers and their patients in the hospital and the home.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, the company is a leader in image-guided therapy, diagnostic imaging, ultrasound, monitoring, enterprise informatics and personal health. Philips generated 2025 sales of approximately EUR 18 billion and employs approximately 63,700 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries. News about Philips can be found at www.philips.com/newscenter.
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- Winners of the 2026 ITEA Awards of Excellence
