Computer Vision News - June 2018

30 Women in Science Computer Vision News Marta Kersten-Oertel Women in Science Marta, are you originally from Canada? I am not. I was born in Poland. We moved when I was five years old to Canada with my family. So you are practically Canadian? So, yes… I am very much Canadian… a naturalized Canadian. Can you tell us about your work? I work in image guided surgery. I’m very much interested in more of the human aspect of things. I’m a prof in human-computer interaction here at Concordia. I’m interested in the perception of the surgeon and how he perceives the images in planning information on the navigation system. I look at things like how we can use augmented reality to help guide the surgeon. Current research also involves things such as having audio feedback instead of visual so as not to overload the whole system… a lot of medical image visualization and perception research in the context of image guided surgery. Are many surgeons involved in this work together with you? I did my PhD at the Neuro, and that’s where all of my contacts are from. One important aspect of our work is actually getting feedback from surgeons and bringing the systems into the operating room so that we can see if what we are doing is actually useful. There are a number of surgeons that work with us on these projects. So it’s a sort of interdisciplinary cooperation? Yeah, we try! When you are doing these kinds of cooperations, who is the leader? The scientist or the surgeon? That is a very difficult question! I really think it is a cooperation though. We bring our ideas to them. One of the things that I did during my PhD was to actually go into the operating room and see how things were working. From an outsider’s perspective, you see things that surgeons are so used to. They don’t realize they are accounting for things like they’re using 2D images when they could be using 3D. Then we bring our ideas to them. They either like them or don’t like them. They’re the boss in how to use the technology. It’s an ever-evolving process where we try to take their comments, fix things, and then bring things back into the OR. How did you feel the first time you Marta Kersten-Oertel is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University where she is the head of the Applied Perception Lab. Concordia “ I found it fascinating ”