Computer Vision News - June 2020

2 Summary The Lab of the Month 8 Yipeng Hu is a lecturer at UCL and a member of the Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS) and the UCL Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC). As part of our series of interviews with experts from the MICCAI field, we speak to Yipeng about his career so far and progress and innovation in ultrasound-guided intervention. Yipeng’s medical imaging journey began during a biomedical engineering degree in China. In his third year, he chose to focus on medical image processing , the only computing option available, and hasn’t looked back since. After his degree, he moved to England and took on a Master’s in biomedical engineering and medical imaging at UCL. There, he worked on a research project with Professor Dean Barratt exploring motion modeling for prostate intervention . He went on to do a PhD with Dean Barratt and his second supervisor, Professor David Hawkes, who founded CMIC in 2005. The PhD topic was multimodality image registration between MR and ultrasound for prostate cancer patients . “One of the most exciting times in my life was going on to develop my PhD work into an image-guided system called SmartTarget for ultrasound- guided interventions for biopsy and focal therapy,” Yipeng beams. “We had a spinout company and it was eventually FDA-approved and CE- marked. We went from very basic methodology development using machine learning to motion modeling for multimodality image registration to completing a guidance system that can be used in theatre. That experience was so interesting. It’s basically what I did in the first decade of my research. The system has just been bought by an American urology company.” Despite having successfully translated his ownwork into a real-world product, Yipeng tells us there is ongoing debate about whether translation should be part of academic research. In his view, research is still a vital part of development. WEISS is breaking down the barriers here with its unique set- up that brings engineers and clinicians together under the same roof. Academic work doesn’t stop once a