Computer Vision News - November 2016

Ralph: Is their any discovery that you expected to happen in the past few years that still hasn’t happened? Polina: I don’t know if I could have predicted that it would come, but it would have been nice to have had more of the algorithms here make it out to the real world. I am surprised by how little gets developed. Ralph: There is a bottleneck in the communication between medicine, academia, and industry. Clare Tempany told me a couple of days ago why she thinks this happens and I would like to ask your opinion too. Polina: I don’t understand why. I do know that this particular part of the society is not subject to regular economic rules. I do wonder whether that’s one of the reasons. It seems that medicine and education are special sectors in which regular economic rules don’t apply. Often times society intervenes somehow, not just because of regulation, but also how the money flows. I wonder if that affects the speed of innovation. I wonder if that actually prevents businesses from jumping in. Ralph: If there was one innovation that didn’t happen that you would have wanted to have happened, what would it be? Polina: Integration of modalities… I think that now it’s not just about imaging. In general, it’s about the data, but imaging certainly suffers from the same problem. Right now, I get an impression that in medicine, when a patient comes in and receives many tests, including imaging tests, specialist doctors look at certain narrow indicators where there is much less integration. Here we call it fusion of all of the information to do some sort of evaluation of what is the best diagnosis. Quite often, it’s sort of piecemeal, and every doctor looks at a particular aspect of the problem. I think that some of it is how the medicine is structured, but some of it is technological failures, in which these pieces of information about a particular patient live separately and never come together to affect the decision jointly. Ralph: In the last few years at all of the conferences we have seen an increasing number of students and researchers from the Far East. What advantage do they bring to our community? Polina: To be honest, I don’t have a very specific opinions about my group. My group is very international, and I have students from all over the world including the Far East. I wouldn’t say that there is something very different about those students. What they do bring is another generation of young students interested in this problem. What I find in the West is that the students are mainly driven by their interest to look at things that are not engineering. It seems that the Asian students are very interested in engineering. In some sense, they are creating a new wave of interest. 35 “ Integration of modalities ” BEST OF MICCAI “ What prevents businesses from jumping in ” Interview with Polina Golland