Interview with SYNTHIA Partner Amied Shadmaan: Reflections on Year One and What Comes Next
As SYNTHIA reaches the end of its first year, we spoke with Amied Shadmaan, Industry Lead Representative for SYNTHIA and GE Healthcare’s lead within the consortium. Amied also coordinates Work Package 6 and Use Case Lung Cancer, giving him a unique perspective on how the project has evolved and where it is heading.
Year One: Aligning Teams and Delivering Results
Reflecting on the first year, Shadmaan pointed to both concrete achievements and the less visible but equally important progress in team dynamics.
“We’ve significantly delivered on many milestones for SYNTHIA—over 18 deliverables, in fact,” he noted, emphasising the steady technical advancements made across the consortium.
Yet for him, the greatest achievement lies in how the partnership has evolved. “Coming together from many different organisations, setting up structured meetings and rhythms to connect and discuss problems—and working together on the path forward—has been a major accomplishment,” he explained. These collaborative foundations are now clearly reflected in the results delivered to IHI.
Priorities for Year Two
Looking ahead, Shadmaan underscored the importance of strengthening alignment across work packages. Many of the key challenges for the coming year revolve around understanding how SYNTHIA’s components interconnect.
“The main priorities are starting to uncover the dependencies between our work packages and the gaps in our thinking around issues like validating synthetic data, hosting it, and sustaining the platform beyond the term of IHI,” he said. Building shared consensus around these questions will be crucial as the project advances into a more integrated phase of development.
A Call for Engagement
Shadmaan also highlighted the importance of openness and community input as SYNTHIA continues its exploratory work.
“We’re in a learning phase, so reaching out to communities, asking for their input, and showing that their perspectives are valuable is really where we should be starting,” he stressed. Stakeholders’ patience and collaboration, he added, are essential as the consortium works through “a really big puzzle” for European healthcare.
The Value of Partnership
From an industry perspective, Shadmaan sees SYNTHIA as a unique opportunity to de-risk innovation and accelerate progress on synthetic data for medical applications. Data scarcity, sensitivity, and acquisition costs remain persistent barriers for AI development, making synthetic data a promising solution, if validated rigorously. “We’re placing a pretty big bet on synthetic data delivering for healthcare,” he said, highlighting the long-term value of developing methods and tools that will continue to serve the field beyond the project’s duration.
Watch the full video interview with Amied Shadmaan
