Computer Vision News - June 2018

32 Marta Kersten-Oertel Women in Science Computer Vision News Can you describe the process by which you and the other scientists make conclusions in your research before the industry adopts it and commercializes it? How does this process work? I think I’d be overstating things to say that we have had a huge influence on what industry is doing. They have their own research teams and do a lot of things. As we publish, we show the surgeons the tools that are useful. One of my things is really to show where augmented reality is useful and where is it not useful. Not every technology will be useful in every situation. We really looked at which specific surgical tasks would really benefit from augmented reality. As we publish these results, hopefully other people will pick up on them. How would you fix the communication between industry and academia? I have a hard time commenting on that because I haven’t reached out to say, “ We have this idea that we published. It might be interesting for you. ” I’m not sure how well that works. In terms of non-medical research, I have a shared grant with a company: I’m a co-PI with Emad Shihab and Tristan Glatard. That seems to work really well. One of the hurdles we have is when commercial systems are closed, it’s very difficult to bring stuff into the operating room. This is why we have IBIS, an open source platform neuro navigation system. There, we can incorporate any research tools. That’s definitely a hurdle. It’s understandable that the systems are closed. We overcome this by creating our own tools and bringing our research system in parallel with the commercial ones. Which company sponsors the grant? It’s a Canadian company called Motsai that does system on module boards for wearable sensors and other types of sensors. “ Someone’s working inside the brain!”