Computer Vision News - June 2019

that will allow you to bring technical innovation to the operating room via something like apps. Still, we have a long way to go. You have dedicated your career to healthcare. Did you choose this field for a reason? Healthcare was definitely not by chance. My background is computer science and I wanted to apply computer science to something useful for the community. When I heard about microchips that you could implant in patients with disabilities so that they would be able to grasp again, I decided to go for healthcare. But I wanted to do something more computational. In 2005, I told my PhD advisor that I would like to apply machine learning to medical imaging. He said that it’s the stupidest idea that he has ever heard because it will never work. [ laughs ] He convinced me to do something different. I started my PhD working in surgery, more on the engineering side of things, not involving machine learning or any of these things. I became a researcher of computer-assisted surgery, working a lot with hardware and devices. At some point, I then became really excited about biophotonics techniques, which are basically methods that deal with the interaction between light and tissue and exploit the properties of how light interacts with tissue. I applied for an ERC starting grant to combine such techniques, in particular multispectral imaging and optoacoustic imaging, with machine learning methodology in surgery. In the project, we apply machine learning techniques (finally!) to convert high-dimensional data to information that is relevant for a physician. We approach the problem in a slightly different way than the biophotonics community, who has focused on model-based approaches for a long time. From the results that we currently have, I would say that machine learning approaches are pretty unique for getting the information fast in the operating room. So finally, after many years, I came back to the machine learning methods that I specialized on in my computer science studies, and I’m very excited about it. CARS 2019 is coming up in a few weeks. You are General Chair at one of its satellite conferences (IPCAI) and you are also organizing the Surgical Data Science Workshop. 34 Computer Vision News Women in Science Women in Science “ He said that it’s the stupidest idea that he has ever heard because it will never work ” With husband and kids: “ More than worth taking on the challenge to balance work and family! ”