Computer Vision News - June 2019

bad physician because I’m not very good at quick decision making. I think if I were in charge in the operating theater, patients would frequently die because it would take me too long to figure out how to proceed best. Have you been in an operating room? It’s part of my job to watch surgeries. It’s part of my job to apply our methods in the operating room. Also, I was a patient a few times already. How does it feel to know that technology that you have developed is helping people? It’s very hard to bring a method all the way to the patient. We call it the translational gap. There are a lot of issues involved there. One is when you do research, sometimes you do it up to a point when it’s good, but then you don’t have the 100% robustness or reliability you need. This is a technical challenge. The other problem is, even if you have a good solution, someone needs to bring it to the market. It’s basically impossible for a startup, for example, to start from scratch and bring something to the operating room. Say you work on endoscopic imaging data, and you have a great method to detect tumors in the data or to predict a complication. Then you have a niche expertise, but you don’t have the expertise to get clinical data access to sell your products. Your innovation may be really good and really helpful, but there are a lot of things involved to translate it. What happens, in the end, is that some of the big companies need to be interested in your work, and then they can bring your innovation to the market. That’s a huge problem, I think. It sounds like a flaw in the system. It is a flaw in the system. Definitely! A flaw that you and I cannot really solve. To some extent, we are working on it. For the first time, we got a project funded by the German Ministry of Economy – not by the Ministry of Research as usual. The aim of the project OP 4.1 is to reduce the market entry barrier for startups that work in computer aided surgery. In analogy to the operating system of a mobile phone, we aim to create a platform Pauline Luc 33 Computer Vision News Lena Maier-Hein Women in Science “ It is a flaw in the system. Definitely! ” ERC Starting Grant COMBIOSCOPY: Machine Learning meets biophotonics for real-time functional imaging in the operating room.