Computer Vision News - February 2020

3 Summary with Leo Joskowicz 9 30 years ago. He is as passionate and enthusiastic as somebody just starting out. “There was great excitement back then,” he remembers. “The cl inicians saw there was potential , but we weren’t able to make a big impact. It was considered to be a niche f ield because it was so di ff icult to make some of these appl ications work and bring them to the real cl inical world. It ’s important to mention that bringing something into a cl inical workf low is much more di ff icult than bringing something into an industrial workf low because of the many actors around. But we were busy doing our thing and we started to get very good results in a short time. That convinced the cl inicians to take a fresh look.” Over the years, industry involvement has changed too. Traditional ly, the focus was on hardware – X-ray machines, ultrasound machines, microscopy, CT and MRI scanners. There were a few companies who were providing picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and hospital information systems (HIS) , but the main players were large companies l ike Phi l ips , Siemens , GE and Toshiba , who bought the scanners and the workstations that were provided to the cl inicians. The workstations were often an afterthought, and radiologists grew accustomed to the fact that they had very l ittle software support to do advanced analysis. Back then, the entry point was very high for smal l companies because of the requirement to integrate technologies into software from one of the major players. Competition was strong and few smal l companies could survive without the necessary resources, ski l ls, and connections. "Software can give an edge without being a master of hardware"