Computer Vision News - December 2021

30 Exclusive Interview It is a pleasure to speak to you Professor Taylor. Can you tell us more about your work? For over 30 years, both here at Johns Hopkins and before that at IBM Research, I have been focused primarily on developing a three-way partnership between humans, technology – machines, robots, sensors – and information, to improve surgery and interventional medicine. Through this partnership, you can improve the intervention for an individual patient by making it safer, more efficacious, and less invasive. You can save that information and relate what you did to outcomes, using statistical methods to improve your treatment processes for the next patient. It really is the synergy between this patient-specific control loop, and this broader machine learning-based use of the information that I think will be driving interventional medicine and the progress of medicine in the coming years. What is the current status of works in this field? In the last 10 years, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of research and commercial activity in this area. Particularly surgical robotics, which seems to get the most publicity. Personally, we are very active. We have a large center here at Johns Hopkins that grew out of a National Science Foundation funded Engineering Research Center that we established shortly after I moved to JHU. There are very, very large centers in this broad area of computer-enhanced interventional medicine around the world in Europe and Asia, as well as in North America now. PROFESSOR RUSSELL TAYLOR Professor Russell Taylor is the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in mechanical engineering, radiology, and surgery. He is also director of JHU’s Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics. With a career spanning over 50 illustrious years, he speaks to us about his experiences to date and his hopes for the future. Johns Hopkins University