Vara is now available on Sectra’s Amplifier Marketplace platform.
Scaling AI across a screening program is an infrastructure challenge. Here’s why this partnership is built for exactly that.
Scaling AI across a screening program is not a science problem. The evidence is in. It is an infrastructure problem. The screening programs that will adopt AI successfully are the ones where the platform, the workflow, and the AI already speak the same language.
That is why we are proud to announce that Vara is now available on Sectra's Amplifier Marketplace platform.
Sectra is the enterprise imaging platform that runs major UK hospital networks and 2,500+ installations across 60 countries, managing 170 million imaging exams per year. It has ranked #1 in customer satisfaction in enterprise imaging for 12 consecutive years. For screening programs and hospital networks already on Sectra, Vara now activates directly inside the platform they use every day.
Why this is an infrastructure problem
European screening programs are not short on evidence that AI works. The PRAIM study, published in Nature Medicine, demonstrated +17.6% cancer detection, up to -15% false recalls, and -59% radiologist workload reduction across 463,156 women in Germany’s national program. Italy’s Istituto Superiore di Sanità issued Europe’s first national guideline recommending AI triage in organized mammography screening in January 2026. The EU now recommends AI-supported double reading over double reading without AI. The UK just launched EDITH, an £11 million trial across 30 sites and 700,000 women.
What programs are short on is a clear path from “we want AI” to “AI is running in our screening workflow.” Every additional system, every new viewer, every separate IT contract between the decision and the deployment is friction. And in screening, where 45% of European radiologists are over 51 and demand is rising, friction is measured in years of delayed adoption and missed cancers.
This partnership removes that friction. Vara now lives inside Sectra. No separate integration project. No new viewer for radiologists to learn. No parallel IT contract to manage.
What Vara brings
Vara is the specialist AI for large-scale screening deployments. We currently support approximately 50% of Germany’s national breast cancer screening programme, processing around 200,000 cases per month across seven years of continuous, cloud-native deployment. It is the largest AI deployment in any organized screening program worldwide.
The clinical foundation is the PRAIM study: the world’s largest and only nationwide prospective trial in mammography AI. 12 centres, 119 radiologists, 463,156 women, routine clinical conditions, all major scanner types (Fuji, GE, Giotto, Hologic, Siemens), zero exclusion criteria. Optimising for one outcome at the expense of another is the more common finding in the literature; PRAIM showed detection, recall, and workload all improving at the same time.
Vara is also the only AI CE-marked for independent second reading in mammography. That means Sectra customers now have a clear pathway to both concurrent and independent AI, from triage to full second reader replacement, backed by leading performance on priors. An independent evaluation at Karolinska across 10,348 screening participants showed Vara’s positive predictive value reaching 18.0% with three rounds of priors, above the radiologist benchmark of 10.1% and a result no other vendor matched.
And every deployment comes with real-time monitoring across six clinical safety dimensions, the operational backbone that proves AI keeps performing in the real world, not just during a controlled study.
What Sectra adds
Sectra is not just any PACS. It is the imaging backbone behind some of Europe’s largest screening programs. In the Netherlands, Sectra runs the entire national breast screening program: 59 mobile trailers, 11 fixed screening locations, and 29 reading units serving 2.2 million eligible women. In Sweden, Region Skåne uses Sectra with integrated AI for breast screening. In the UK, Sectra is the leading enterprise imaging provider by market share. Across 60 countries, Sectra manages 170 million imaging exams annually.
Sectra has been building toward exactly this kind of partnership. Earlier this year, it completed the acquisition of Oxipit, the Lithuanian AI company behind ChestLink (the world’s first CE Class IIb certified autonomous AI for chest X-ray analysis), signaling a commitment to AI that actually automates rather than merely assists. Its Amplifier Marketplace already hosts over 100 validated AI applications. And at HIMSS 2026, Sectra showcased Model Context Protocol (MCP)-powered prototypes designed to make AI integration across enterprise imaging seamless and interoperable.
For radiologists who already live inside Sectra’s diagnostic viewer every day, adding Vara does not mean learning a new system. It means their existing system gets smarter.
Why this matters now
Europe’s screening programs face growing case volumes, radiologist capacity under pressure (nine EU countries will lose a higher share to retirement by 2027 than the EU average), and screening age ranges expanding to cover women 45 to 74. Countries are rewriting guidelines. Italy issued Europe’s first national recommendation for AI triage in screening. The UK launched an £11 million trial across 30 sites. The EU committed €1 billion through Apply AI Strategy. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in screening. It is how fast programs can get it running inside the systems their radiologists already use.
This partnership is built for the scale that screening programs require. The programs that move now will be the ones that chose infrastructure partners wisely.