Computer Vision News - January 2022

45 Daniel Rueckert I know how important and satisfying it was for you to see so many academics succeed because of your leadership and mentoring. Did pulling back from that role feel like any kind of sacrifice on your side? Partly. You obviously have to reduce your time on one thing, but you are shifting your focus and working with a different group of people. You are absolutely right it is so rewarding to see the people you have been working with go on to be successful. It takes a lot of time to get to know people well enough to find out what their strengths are and where they would flourish most. That is probably the biggest part of the job. The impact you have from mentoring people is more long-lasting than any of your papers. In 10 years’ time there will be something other than deep learning and nobody will remember your deep learning papers, but hopefully your colleagueswill always remember you! Can you tell us more about your research? We want to go more in the direction of clinical translation. Taking the algorithms we develop and putting them in the hands of clinicians to get their feedback. Sometimes that feedback will be that it is great and will really help; other times, it will be that it is not working, and we need to improve it – we want to hear that! One of the aspects we are working on now is a system where we take every paper we produce and test it in a clinical environment. Germany is big on data protection. It is very Daniel Rueckert is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor for AI in Medicine and Healthcare at the Technical University of Munich and a part-time professor at Imperial College London. He speaks to us about his work at the intersection of computer science and medicine. Daniel, our previous interview was three and a half years ago at MICCAI 2018 in Granada, when you had almost 50 PhDs students and a very big operation at Imperial. A lot has changed since then! Can you fill in the gap for us? Imperial is still a large part of my activities, but whenwe last spoke, I hadabig administrative role there as the head of a large department with nearly 60 academics. I wanted to get closer to research again and had a chance to take a position shared between medicine and computer science at TU Munich. It is a fantastic opportunity to bring the work we do much closer to the translation into clinical practice. Two years ago, Imperial College and TU Munich signed a strategic collaboration agreement to work more closely together. I was very lucky the people in Munich were keen for me to keep part of my position at Imperial, and the people at Imperial agreed!