Computer Vision News - March 2023

16 Women in Computer Vision You told me where we stand today, but you still have decades of research in front of you. Where do you think science will stand when you retire? What will you know, and what will you not know by then? I think my retirement will be a little far away [ laughs ]. Tell me then about the next ten years. Technology is developing really fast, compared to the years I did my PhD or my early faculty years. Even today, we are seeing a really fast pace of development in biomarkers and technology. That is a combination of techniques being more advanced, but we're also seeing the effect of big data. There are more efforts where before siloed data sets are now shared! So, creating larger and diverse data sets coming together, allows us to see a bigger picture of how diseases affect individuals. And at the same time, machine learning impute from MRI imaging measurements what are the true pathological changes. Again, these are really relying on imaging modalities that are sometimes not easy to access, especially when you think about underrepresented populations or low- income or low-socioeconomic-status regions. The new thing that's very exciting, especially in the Alzheimer's domain, is the plasma biomarkers, the blood biomarkers. Things are really connected: your brain is not in isolation and there is constant interaction with the blood. Even though other things contribute to the composition of the blood, we still see a contribution from the nervous system to the blood. And one really exciting development happening in our domain is the development of specific blood biomarkers for the Alzheimer's pathology. Again, it's in the very early development at the early stages, but it's very promising. If it works, people can get a blood assessment like we get every year for cholesterol, vitamin levels, or glucose level. A similar screening can be used very easily in every clinical setting to detect Alzheimer's pathology related changes. It’s not our data, it’s people’s data, and we owe it to science to make it available!