Pixels with Purpose: How Ángel Alberich is Teaching Medical Images to Speak

At first glance Benicarló is an unassuming yet beautiful Mediterranean town on the Spanish coast—citrus groves, fishing boats, factories that once powered the local economy.

Yet it was here, in a modest flat above those orange‑scented streets, that Ángel Alberich began his journey to create an idea that is now reshaping medical imaging. His parents’ shifts in a factory left him many solitary hours, but he never felt bored.

Evenings were divided between science books and televised bullfights with his grandparents; summers meant cannon‑balling into water‑storage tanks that doubled as makeshift swimming pools.

From his parents he absorbed his core values “responsibility, hard work, perseverance, and build your own life.” The lesson stuck: anything worth having would be self‑made.

Two desks, one Game Boy, and a revelation

University in Valencia offered him space to think and build. Lacking a formal biomedical engineering track, Ángel enrolled in telecommunications—electronics, coding, signal processing.

“If you could come to my room, I would have my desk to study, but I also had another desk to build stuff.”

On that workbench he started what seemed at the time a simple project: using electronics to measure electrical signals generated by the human body. “For my own interest, I built that kit on taking a Game Boy and working on an ECG.”

The handheld console captured heart rhythms—rough, uncalibrated, but seeded an idea for Ángel.

A flatmate soon coaxed him into a week‑long summer school where he found a course that would help him build on his newfound passion for biomedical engineering. The faculty roster read like a who’s‑who of Spain’s clinician‑scientists. For seven days Ángel soaked up lectures. He returned “totally transformed,” wrote an obsessive report, and emailed every researcher he could find in Valencia. Only one replied.

The radiologist who bankrolled an engineer

Luis Martí‑Bonmatí, then head of radiology at La Fe University Hospital, had a puzzle.

Some post‑menopausal women with normal bone‑density scans were having fractures, while others with low density remained fracture‑free. Density alone was missing something. Could software analyse bone micro‑architecture directly from CT?

Ángel, 22, dove in. The duo’s first papers won slots at the European Congress of Radiology; a dozen more followed. But hospital regulations forbade hiring an engineer into the imaging team, so Luis paid Ángel’s salary himself.

That act hard‑wired trust into Ángel’s management DNA. New hires at Quibim would receive full trust and the tools for the job on day one. “We give you all the trust, one‑hundred percent trust at the very beginning, and it’s on you to preserve that.”

‘Are you playing video games?’

Years inside reading rooms revealed a wider blind spot. Radiologists dictated long textual reports yet longed for numbers—tumour volumes, texture scores, subtle changes over time.

When Ángel overlaid colour maps on glioma scans to measure irregularity, a consultant peeked over his shoulder and joked: “Are you playing video games?”

The quip masked a need. Imaging was already digital; medicine simply hadn’t asked the pixels to speak. A company idea crystallised: automate the tedious, quantify the invisible, liberate specialists for the judgement calls algorithms couldn’t handle.

Quibim launches on the day he becomes a father

On June 18th 2014 Ángel experienced what he calls “a high overdose of adrenaline.” His first child had arrived that morning, yet day one of the Lanzadera accelerator—where he’d won a coveted slot—was slated for the very same date.

“Today starts the accelerator … and I need to pitch to the main founder of the accelerator because that’s the day they assigned to me,” he told his wife. With her blessing, he left the maternity ward, travelled to the accelerator campus, delivered his pitch to billionaire Juan Roig, and hurried back to newborn duties the same evening.

The gamble paid off. Roig took a personal interest, handing Ángel a stack of seven management books and drilling the cohort on mission, vision, and values until every verb earned its place. Culture, Ángel realised, wasn’t décor—it was operating code for scale.

Cash crunch and a fainting spell

Product‑market fit arrived faster than capital. Negotiations for the first fundraise stretched perilously as payroll approached zero. “I had to end up paying salaries of the employees for three months in a row from my own savings until I had zero savings.”

Six sleepless nights later Ángel collapsed at his desk. The term‑sheet landed days after he recovered—an experience that still colours every fundraise. Ángel’s lessons from that? Understand the investors main interest, reduce the risk of the operation, keep calm in negotiations, and take control of the situation.

Teaching pixels to predict the future

Quibim’s platform now analyses medical imaging at over 190 sites globally. Its algorithms stage liver fibrosis, grade osteoarthritis, quantify tumour heterogeneity, and—most provocatively—predict genetic mutations from routine imaging.

“When you measure the standalone performance of those algorithms right now, they are equally comparable, if not superior to radiologists.” Normal studies are waved through automatically; specialists focus on the edge cases.

Emails arrive from grateful families: “Patients, coming to us saying, well, my cancer was detected by your AI, being so grateful.”

Culture as competitive software

Inside the company, Ángel laminated lessons from Juan Roig and aviation’s just‑culture into an operating manual.

Mistakes trigger open de‑briefs, not finger‑pointing: is this a gap in training, a broken process, an unclear SOP? Issues aren’t swept under the carpet; they become tickets, fixes, and eventually standard operating procedure.

Turnover remains low; ownership runs high.

‘The revolution in healthcare will come from patients’

For all the regulatory wins and hospital contracts, Ángel insists that true disruption won’t originate inside institutions. “The revolution in healthcare will come from patients. It will not come from governments.”

He envisions individuals owning lifetime image archives, querying AI for second opinions, and donating anonymised data to sharpen future models. In that world radiologists evolve from fire‑fighters to flight controllers—monitoring dashboards of algorithmic alerts, intervening where it counts.

Out‑gunning the Goliaths

Quibim now goes head‑to‑head with OEMs that build both the scanners and the software, yet the startup punches above its weight.

A recent FDA 510(k) clearance for QP-prostate arrived early in 2025, which aims to increase diagnostic accuracy and early detection of prostate cancer. Ángel credits these wins to culture: small, trusted teams ship sooner; the just‑culture catches errors before regulators do.

Ten more ideas taped above a desk

A decade in, Ángel still keeps building—now inside Quibim’s Valencia headquarters. While he’s kept busy with the CEO‑work of budgets and board decks; he still finds time for “ten more ideas” to improve healthcare management and push non‑invasive diagnostics deeper.

“The mission is trying to detect disease early, to diagnose better, to be able to give the right treatment to the right patient at the right time.”

Ángel is pushing for imaging to be used earlier, in screening. This approach has been proven to save many women from breast cancer. He builds on the same belief that began with a Game Boy ECG: the body is broadcasting. All we have to do, is listen.

“I’ve always been captivated by trying to understand everything happening at every single tissue point of our human body.”

That obsession, born in a town better known for oranges than algorithms, is now teaching pixels to whisper secrets—long before disease has its say.