Nicolab
Nicolab is a cloud platform for acute stroke care. Its StrokeViewer AI triages CT and MR scans for large vessel occlusion, haemorrhage and perfusion, then connects hospital teams through a certified DICOM viewer and secure messaging.
What is Nicolab?
Nicolab is a Dutch medical technology company, headquartered in Amsterdam, whose platform helps hospitals move faster on acute stroke. It grew out of the MR CLEAN trial, the first randomised study to prove the benefit of endovascular treatment, and was set up as a spin-off of Amsterdam University Medical Center by two of that trial's researchers, Dr Merel Boers and Dr Renan Sales Barros. Exclusive access to the heterogeneous MR CLEAN dataset gave the first version of its product, StrokeViewer, an unusually varied training base.
The platform has three layers. The first is an AI portfolio that reads brain imaging: it detects and localises large vessel occlusions including the distal M2 branch, flags subtle intracranial and subarachnoid haemorrhage on non-contrast CT, computes a standardised ASPECTS score, quantifies collateral circulation and runs automated CT and MR perfusion analysis with configurable thresholds. The second is a DICOM viewer certified for diagnostic use, on mobile and on the web, which streams a complete series in under ten seconds and offers 3D volume rendering. The third is a collaboration layer built for the hub-and-spoke model: instant notifications to phone, email or PACS, two-click encrypted transfer of a study to another hospital, real-time screen sharing and in-app messaging the vendor describes as GDPR and HIPAA compliant.
Everything runs in the cloud with no hardware to install, in a dedicated environment per hospital, and the customer chooses the cloud vendor and where data sits. Nicolab claims contracts with more than two hundred hospitals and over 170,000 patients assisted. Its published impact figures include a 28% rise in thrombectomy use for early-window transfer patients and a 54-minute cut in time to expert notification.
Regulatory status is unusually well documented. The portfolio carries CE and UKCA marks through BSI; the mobile DICOM viewer, LVO triaging, haemorrhage triaging and perfusion are FDA cleared; the product is on the Australian ARTG and registered with MedSafe, TFDA, Thai FDA, CDSCO and Swissmedic. Quality and security are certified to ISO 13485:2016, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and NEN 7510-1. Results are always displayed for the clinician's own interpretation: the decision stays human.
What it does
- Flag a suspected large vessel occlusion on CT angiography, down to the distal M2 branch, and notify the whole stroke team
- Detect subtle intracranial and subarachnoid haemorrhage on non-contrast CT and triage the case in real time
- Pinpoint the occlusion and take the reader straight to the slices that contain it
- Produce a standardised ASPECTS score from a non-contrast CT within minutes
- Quantify collateral circulation and run automated CT or MR perfusion analysis with configurable Tmax and CBF thresholds
- Forward imaging and patient data to another hospital in the regional network in two clicks, encrypted, within seconds
- Stream a full DICOM series to a phone in under ten seconds and push result series back to the PACS
When to use Nicolab / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Nicolab is the right fit.
When to use Nicolab
- Interventional neuroradiologists and neurologists who need the occlusion finding on their phone before the patient reaches the angio suite
- Radiologists on call who must read a full DICOM series remotely, at night or away from the hospital
- Emergency physicians and acute stroke teams working across a regional hub-and-spoke network
- Telestroke and stroke telemedicine services covering several sites from a single roster
- Hospital RIS-PACS managers and IT teams looking for a stroke tool with no on-premise hardware to maintain
When not to use Nicolab
- Individual clinicians or students: access is granted only to users a contracting hospital has declared
- Buyers who need a published price, a free tier or self-service sign-up before speaking to a salesperson
- Departments outside stroke and neurovascular imaging, since the portfolio covers nothing else
- Teams wanting to reuse the AI output in their own research or publications, which the terms forbid without written permission
- Sites that require an on-premise installation, as the platform is cloud-only by design
How to use Nicolab
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Request a demo through the form on the site; an expert calls back to schedule a live walkthrough of the app
- Agree the commercial package - proposal, data processing agreement, terms and conditions, service level agreement and implementation plan
- Run the implementation project jointly with hospital IT and clinical staff: four to six weeks on average, roughly 24 hours of hospital time
- Connect the existing scanners and PACS, the platform being vendor-agnostic and requiring no additional hardware
- Declare the list of authorised users to Nicolab by email, and keep it updated whenever staff change
- Set up authentication: single sign-on through the hospital's own system, with multi-factor authentication mandatory for every user
- Install the mobile app - iOS 15.5 or Android 5.0 and above, about 76 MB - and lock it with a PIN or biometrics
- Let studies flow in: the AI analyses each scan and pushes a notification to mobile, email or the PACS
- Open the DICOM viewer to stream the series, read the colour-coded maps and check the automated scores
- Forward the study, share your screen in real time or message colleagues in-app to align on the treatment decision
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Regulatory status published in plain text: CE marking through BSI (notified body 2797), UKCA (approved body 0086), FDA clearances, ARTG, MedSafe, TFDA, Thai FDA, CDSCO and Swissmedic
- Quality and security management systems certified to ISO 13485:2016, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and NEN 7510-1:2017+A1:2020
- Performance figures published with their references rather than as bare marketing claims
- Traceable academic origin: a spin-off of Amsterdam University Medical Center built on the MR CLEAN trial dataset
- Short, bounded patient data retention - 30 days maximum, 14 by default - with irreversible deletion of every copy
- Credible data sovereignty story: a dedicated cloud environment per hospital and a security whitepaper detailing storage country by country
- Terms, data processing agreement, privacy policy and security whitepaper all freely downloadable, with a named DPO and a published vulnerability disclosure policy
Cons
- No public pricing whatsoever: no pricing page, no plan list, no indicative range - everything goes through a negotiated proposal
- No free plan and no free trial; the mobile app can be downloaded but is unusable without a hospital account
- Narrow scope, limited to stroke and neurovascular imaging
- Uneven regulatory coverage: the full portfolio is CE and UKCA marked, but only four functions are FDA cleared
- The terms forbid customers from using the results in internal R&D or in scientific publications without written permission
- Nicolab reserves the use of anonymised data for product development, with no documented way to opt out
- No public API or developer documentation, and contractual liability capped at 2,500,000 euros
Pricing & Plans
Nicolab publishes no pricing. There is no pricing page, no plan list and no indicative range, and the paths a visitor would expect all return the site's standard 404. The terms and conditions place costs in a negotiated proposal, and note that user management services and future functional upgrades may carry additional charges. Neither a free plan nor a free trial is mentioned anywhere on the site. The only entry point is a demo request form.
- No pricing plan is published on the site
- contractual options rather than published commercial plans
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Nicolab handles your data.
GDPR overview
Implementation is concrete and documented. A data processing agreement drafted under Article 28(3) GDPR is downloadable from the Legal page, alongside the terms and a services privacy policy translated into six languages. A data protection officer is named and reachable by email. The privacy policy, last modified on 9 April 2026, cites its legal bases article by article - Article 6(1)(a) consent, Article 6(1)(b) contract performance - details the Article 15 to 21 rights and the right to complain to the Dutch supervisory authority. Recipients are stated to sit in the EU or EEA, with standard contractual clauses or binding corporate rules for any transfer beyond. In-app messaging is described as GDPR and HIPAA compliant. An Article 27 representative is named for the UK GDPR only; none is required in the EU, the company being established in the Netherlands.
Who owns the data?
Nicolab keeps the intellectual property. The terms state that StrokeViewer, its documentation and every associated right - copyright, trade secrets, patents, design rights, trademarks and database rights - remain its exclusive property, and that Nicolab is the sole owner of the rights attached to the StrokeViewer algorithms, including those related to the scans a customer uploads. Under the data processing agreement the hospital stays the controller of its patient data and Nicolab acts as processor within the meaning of Article 28(3) GDPR. Nicolab reserves the right to anonymise data for quality monitoring and product development, and guarantees that no third party may use uploaded scans without the customer's written consent.
Reuse rights
No. Customers may use the results only internally, within the service scope defined in the agreement. The terms explicitly rule out using them for product improvement, internal research and development, or any other purpose, and forbid using StrokeViewer or its results in scientific studies or publications without Nicolab's prior written permission. No further right or title is granted to the customer. The patient data itself remains under the hospital's control as data controller, so its clinical reuse follows the hospital's own legal basis rather than anything the vendor grants.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Each hospital gets a dedicated cloud environment, and the customer chooses both the cloud vendor and where data is stored and processed. Nicolab states that patient information sits in Google Cloud facilities located in or near the client's country. Its security whitepaper is more specific: Dutch hospital data is processed on servers in the Netherlands, with Belgium or Germany as overflow; the German environment keeps all storage, transfer and processing in Frankfurt; the UK environment keeps everything in London and has passed the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit; Australian infrastructure sits inside Australian borders and was assessed as strongly aligned with PROTECTED-level controls; New Zealand data is currently held in Australia. Data is encrypted at rest with AES, each chunk under its own key, and every component-to-component transfer is encrypted; no patient data is ever downloaded to a device. One tension is worth noting: the subprocessor annex of the data processing agreement lists Google Cloud, AWS and Stream.io with a worldwide-including-USA scope under standard contractual clauses, which sits awkwardly beside the national containment the whitepaper describes. Confirm the actual configuration for your own environment.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Nicolab.
- A fast automated alert can erode vigilance over time; the vendor itself stresses that results are shown for the reader's own interpretation and that the decision stays with the clinician
- Published performance is good but not perfect: 85.9% specificity on LVO triaging means false positives, and sensitivity around 91% means cases that will still be missed
- Part of the evaluation data came primarily from GE scanners, with a limited number of Siemens, Toshiba and Philips studies, so behaviour on a different fleet may not match the published figures
- Several performance claims rest on internal sources - an internal clinical validation study, an internal reproducibility report and the instructions for use - rather than independent evaluation
- The full portfolio is CE and UKCA marked but only four functions are FDA cleared; using a function outside its approved scope in a given country is a regulatory risk for the hospital, not only for the vendor
- The terms let Nicolab use anonymised data for product development with no documented opt-out, and forbid customers from publishing on the results, which limits independent scrutiny
- The subprocessor annex gives Google Cloud, AWS and Stream.io a worldwide-including-USA transfer scope under standard contractual clauses while the security whitepaper promises national containment; and two unedited template FAQ entries are still live on the site, a sign that not every page is proofread
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for the hospital, by design. There is no hardware to install and no ongoing maintenance: existing scanners and PACS are connected to a cloud environment, whatever their manufacturer. Nicolab runs the project with IT and clinical staff against an implementation plan, in four to six weeks on average and about 24 hours of hospital time. The main technical work is authentication - single sign-on against the hospital's own system, with mandatory multi-factor authentication - plus declaring authorised users. For the end user it comes down to installing an app and logging in.
Deployment
Apps stores
Behind Nicolab
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly does Nicolab do?
Which AI algorithms are included?
Is it cloud-based or installed on site?
Can it read scans from any CT vendor?
Is there a mobile app?
Where is patient data stored and for how long?
Which certifications and clearances does it hold?
How long does implementation take?
How much does it cost?
Is a data processing agreement available?
Should you pick Nicolab?
Nicolab is one of the more solid clinical AI propositions in this directory, and also one of the least accessible. Its credibility rests on things that are easy to check: an origin in the MR CLEAN trial, a spin-off from Amsterdam University Medical Center, performance figures published with the reports they come from, and a compliance page that lists regulator by regulator what is cleared where. Certification to ISO 13485, ISO/IEC 27001 and NEN 7510-1, a published data processing agreement and a 30-day maximum retention on patient data put it well ahead of most healthcare software on governance.
The reservations are just as concrete. Nothing about the commercial terms is public: no price, no plan, no trial, and an entry point that begins and ends with a demo form. The scope is deliberately narrow - stroke and neurovascular imaging, nothing else. FDA clearance covers four functions where the CE mark covers the whole portfolio, so what a hospital can actually use depends on where it sits. And the contract is one-sided in places: customers cannot publish on the results or reuse them in internal research without written permission, while Nicolab reserves anonymised data for its own product development with no stated way to opt out.
For a stroke network that already knows it wants this category, Nicolab is a serious candidate and the documentation available before contact is unusually generous. For anyone still comparing options on price or wanting to trial software before committing, this is not a tool that can be evaluated from the outside. Read the terms and the security whitepaper before the first call: both are public, and both say more than the marketing pages.
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