CARS Preview 2018

at CARS! Can you tell us something about what you are going to present? At CARS, I’m going to present two things. One is more focused on multi- disciplinary collaboration, so that’s basically dealing with the question: who is actually the expert in such constellations? Conventional collaborations from the field tend to make the neurosurgeon the expert - the one who knows everything and should be able to communicate - and we have a different approach, so we’re heading towards a new expert culture. We are combining expertise from different fields to combine their strength. For daily surgical routine, that means that we could understand clinical workflows from a more external perspective. We are trying to make clinical knowledge explicit, because it is usually very implicit, so the clinical folks know what they’re talking about but no one else does. Like computer scientists don’t and designers don’t. I will also be talking about who should be in such a team. What kind of expertise is needed? Where should this constellation be? What kind of clinical work will come out of such constellations? I will talk about previous collaboration efforts, like hospitals and industry, and hospitals and academic institutions. What is the balance of power like in these cross-disciplinary teams? The usual constellation would be that the clinicians are the leaders. I don’t think they are well equipped enough to do that, because they’re very good at what they do, but they don’t know much about the strength and expertise of other people working in the field, for example, because it’s not part of their daily work. If by magic you could give them a feature that’s missing, what would it be? Profound technological insight. They don’t have that yet? They cannot have it, because we are facing so much technology in the clinical realm - on a daily basis there is more coming, so you cannot know all of that. You should be able to understand the principles and be able to communicate your needs and demands from a surgical perspective to a non- surgical expert, like a computer scientist or even a marketing person. But if you say that they can’t, does it mean that the battle is lost in advance? Not necessarily. I think what’s missing currently is an interpreter. That’s part of our work to translate between the different groups. What do you think could happen that would lead to a remarkable improvement? I think the biggest advancement would be a closer collaboration between industry and surgeons. At the moment, industry representatives or manufacturers for medical devices provide us with awesome tools, but Anna Roethe 5 CARS 2018 Preview Presurgical planning helps surgeons match diagnostic mapping information to the actual patient on the OR table, e.g., by using augmented reality applications. In doing so, data visualization is just as important as multimodal data quality. Image: IGL/Charité 2018