Computer Vision News - May 2020

3 Summary WEISS Dan Stoy nov 17 patient enters the operating room, or after? How is that process managed? How can it become more seamless, with fewer bottlenecks? Dan argues that we often think a focus on preoperative planning is going to help, but if that preoperative planning involves a lot of effort or time, it won’t necessarily fit with the clinical reality of what needs to be done. It is important to interface with the entire clinical workflow . He tells us that he had a lively recent discussion with his clinical director, Prof. Laurence Lovat . At WEISS, they focus on surgery and on interventions, but should they also be working with pathologists? “He said pathology is what happens after the procedure, so it’s not part of what we do. I said yes, but there’s no reason for that. We could bring pathology closer to the procedure. If you develop technology to bring pathology inside the operating room, that can actually improve outcomes and the whole process.” Having the correct diagnosis, plan, instrumentation, and understanding of risk factors around a specific patient will all help the operation to work better. Dan is excited to talk about the latest papers coming out from WEISS. A recent opinion piece published by clinical investigator Hani Marcus has been featured in the Nature Machine Intelligence journal. It looks at robotic surgery and examines the opinions of patients, families of patients, and various stakeholders involved in real- world activity. They have also just had a review paper about spectral imaging accepted by Medical Image Analysis. “Something we’ve been very interested in for a long time with collaborators from other institutions is how light interacts with tissue,” he tells us. “From a personal perspective, I’ve always been interested in this from the computational angle. How can we develop computational techniques on top of this spectral information? How does it link with the work that we’re doing in AI to segment or track structures and tissue or link to fundamental biological processes or physiological properties of tissue? This paper brings us up to date as to what the capability is in that space and where we should invest more effort. It’s an area that I would like us to work more on in the coming years.” Dan is also keen to talk about the work the team have been doing with Digital Surgery and Touch Surgery . Having "It is important to interface with the entire clinical workflow." "We could bring pathology closer to the procedure."