Computer Vision News - February 2022

17 Marianna Meo to France formy first job opportunity, that’s when I found another need that brought me to the academia world. So, I started a PhD thesis on cardiac signal processing. I started with that, and I started building knowledge on electrophysiology, the medicine of the heart. I started building engineering knowledge. I learned how to use programming tools and how to implement algorithms. Then, little by little, other opportunities came across my path. I had a postdoc in Boston at Harvard Medical School at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Then another one in Bordeaux in cardiac signal processing. Through all these opportunities, I built my knowledge: it was not something that I expected in the beginning. That’s also the beauty of research: new fields open up. We get interested in them. We gain knowledge. Then we propose and spread this knowledge through our applications. Now, I’m very happy because I’m also working for a company, which is also a different perspective.  Marianna, can you tell us about your work? Sure, I work in the advanced development team, which is something that comes a little bit before Research & Development, as we know it. What we try to do is propose concepts to be integrated into our product, which I will describe in a minute, in order to prove the feasibility before delivering them to Research & Development, that is going to integrate the concepts in the product. What is our product? EPD solutions produces systems for cardiac mapping for electroanatomical reconstruction of the heart chambers in the treatment of cardiac arrhythmia. There are a variety of tools that are integrated into these kinds of systems. We have imaging. We have catheter navigation. These surgeries are not performed open heart, but you have to introduce a catheter through a vein, so it’s minimally invasive. You also have a lot of signals that are recorded through these catheters, and this is my specialty. I work with my colleagues, my team, to develop signal processing tools to analyze the information that is brought by these signals that are recorded at the surface of the heart chambers.  Did you know in advance that one day you would master such deep scientific and medical concepts?  I follow the path full of opportunity. In the very beginning, there was the need, on my side, to do something related to healthcare and try to provide a service to patients. I was always driven by this need. This is why my university studies were focused on biomedical engineering. I wanted to apply technology and put them in the service of patients and doctors. Then, when I moved