The European Patent Office (EPO) has granted the patent "Annotation of Slice Images in Volumetric Medical Images" to a research team from the University of Science, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM). Published in the European Patent Bulletin on July 8, 2026, it is VNU-HCM's first European patent in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) applied to medicine. The invention was led by Dr. Le Khanh Duy, with Associate Professor Tran Minh Triet and two alumni from the university's 2018 Honors Bachelor's Program, Nguyen Ho Thang Long and Pham Minh Khoi, who are doctoral researchers at Dublin City University in Ireland. The research addresses the challenge of annotating CT and MRI images to create high-quality training datasets, as current datasets contain hundreds or thousands of image slices requiring time-consuming, inconsistent manual labeling. The team developed a solution combining computer vision algorithms with advanced data visualization, allowing users to label one slice while the system automatically propagates annotations to neighboring slices with confidence scores for verification. This reduces annotation time and improves dataset consistency, a key factor in AI model performance for medical image analysis. Dr. Le Khanh Duy noted the core value is a more effective interaction model between human experts and AI-assisted systems, not a new AI algorithm. The team hopes the technology will be integrated into medical image annotation software. Earlier, four Vietnamese scientists were also granted a patent by the U.S.