Computer Vision News - October 2021

48 Women in Science Best of MICCAI 2021 Catarina Barata is an Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon as well as a Research Fellow at Institute for Systems and Robotics . More than 100 inspiring interviews with successful Women in Science in our archive Catarina, you live in Lisbon and you are Portuguese. Yes. You work mainly on skin cancer. Yes, I started on skin cancer during my Master’s thesis, so it’s a while ago. My main focus in the beginning was to develop artificial intelligence systems for diagnosing skin cancer, in particular melanoma, which is a huge problem here in Portugal and it’s becoming worse! In recent years, I’ve tried to move a little bit beyond that. More than the diagnosis, I want to understand this disease, and how people treated for this disease react to the different therapies. Why is this problem becoming worse? It is related to the way we behave. If you think about our grandparents, when they went to the beach, they’d be fully dressed. In the present, people are more aware of the dangers of the sun and getting sunburnt, so they are starting to wear protection. But the skin remembers! It’s not like you get a sunburn in the summer, and you get melanoma next year. There is a big gap between the sunburn and the disease actually appearing. That’s why, in some countries like Australia, where people are very fair skinned, people are in direct contact with the sun and get a lot of sun burns. Then the disease appears after like twenty-something years. That’s why it is a big problem. Sun burns that people got in the 90’s are coming back to haunt them now. Would it be better to go to the beach in full clothes like one hundred years ago? No, but you should respect the hours. They are like: “Are you the professor?!”