Computer Vision News - December 2021

47 Christina Koutsoumpa is supposed to be the most prestigious technical university in my country. Then I proceeded tomyMaster’s studies. I studied biomedical engineering in Greece. After my Master’s, I moved to London. At Imperial College London, I studied my PhD in the Department of Computing at the Hamlyn Centre. Shortly, after my PhD, I moved to the US for a postdoc at Harvard Medical School at the Boston Children’s Hospital for robotic surgery. I would like to share with our readers that Christina is currently open to finding her next job. She is a great catch! Maybe some of our readers have something to offer her! Tell me something Christina, what have you enjoyed the most in your studies up until now? I really like computer vision and deep learning. I really like creating models that detect features on images that are not visible to the human eye. It’s like a kind of magic! [ laughs ] You extract information that you cannot easily see or easily quantify. I find this really exciting to extract the useful information from images and show it in a comprehensive way, especially medical images which are not easily understandable due to not only the lack of background for most people but also due to high corruption of artifacts. You help the medical community anddoctors toperform a more accurate diagnosis. You also create visualizations and quantitative measures that most people can understand. I hope in the future that we can help patients better understand their pathologies. I find this really, really exciting, this combination of technology and medicine. It’s something thatwas not easy tocombine in thepast. For years, we thought these were completely two separate fields. It turns out that they can be very complementary to each other. I really like this.  You spoke about a lot of interesting research. But you didn’t knowabout these fields before you started. What inspired you as a young Greek girl to take this path? This is a really nice question. Thank you for asking me! I rarely get asked this question. When I was a young student, I really enjoyed math. I would spend hours solving problems. I didn’t know what I wanted to become exactly. I knew that I really enjoyed math, physics, and solving problems. Later on, I decided to become “I kind of went with the flow!”