On January 15, 2009, the kick off meeting of the NFBI was held at the TU Delft with 70 participants both from the academic research world and different companies. Where 30 years ago only pioneers were working in the Medical Imaging Processing field, nowadays Medical Image Processing has established itself in the Netherlands with at least 7 high quality research groups, multiple M.Sc. and Ph.D. programs and many medical software companies.

The first officious step towards the foundation of the NFBI was in 2005, when the first Medical Imaging Symposium for PhD-students was held. The main focus of the Symposium was to promote informal contacts and knowledge exchange between PhD students in Biomedical Imaging. With an average attendance of 40 PhD-Students of 7 different groups, it became clear that there was a need for a common organization in the Medical Imaging Field.

Also Prof. Max Viergever, Prof. Wiro Niessen and Prof. Hans Reiber were aware of a gap in common organization. Therefore, in 2008 they agreed to join forces and the foundation of the Netherlands Forum for Biomedical Imaging was a fact.