MICCAI 2018 Daily - Monday

I think the Society is growing and maturing. One of the things we try to do is increase our impact. One way we want to do that is by engaging with other societies. Last year, for example, we started a collaboration with the American College of Radiology. They represent 70,000 radiologists in the United States. They’re very important in shaping the future of their field. One of the things which is important to them is making sure that the enormous opportunities of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning make a positive impact in radiology. As a community, we have great algorithms and great ideas, but we need to know the problems for which solutions are needed and we need to collaborate. As we’ve organised challenges, we have identified specifically the field of the evaluation of algorithms as being a powerful means to bring the MICCAI community and the radiological community together. We even have a keynote this year by Geraldine McGinty, the President of the American College of Radiology, and we will be discussing how we can further shape this collaboration to increase the impact of the community. She represents a large group of people that can profit a lot from our solutions. If they profit, the patients profit, and we really have societal impact. We’ve talked about the speakers and the activities; How is the community evolving? We’re a very active community. There are a lot of bottom-up initiatives. One thing I would like to mention specifically is that we decided yesterday that we’re going to explore the concept of what we now call special interest groups. Basically, they will be groups within the MICCAI Society that take a certain theme and organise events around it. They will eventually organise yearly workshops at the conference, as well as other things to make sure that they flourish as a subdiscipline of MICCAI. This was a bottom-up initiative of people, in this case in the field of shape analysis, that already are quite a strong community, but feel that by organising themselves a bit better and doing that under the flag of the MICCAI Society, can have an even bigger impact. We are going to pilot that concept this year with this first special interest group, but then we will do a call for more of these special interest groups in the future. This way we think we will make our community more vibrant. A lot has been done this year to equilibrate the CAI part with the MIC part. Can you tell us about the CAI part? I think MIC and CAI are and have always been an interesting part of the MICCAI Society. It is still very important to make sure that these communities interact a lot. If you look at image-guided interventions next to all the work in the instruments and robotization, there is a lot of image guidance, but there is also a lot of potential of the same artificial intelligence techniques that are being used more in the diagnostic side, to use them in the interventional side. You can do machine learning on camera images. You can do all the concepts of evidence- based medicine – gathering a lot of data; linking pre-operative data to outcomes to complications to the interventions. There are so many challenges that people in MIC and CAI have in common, even though there’s A Word fromWiro 11 Monday “ They represent 70,000 radiologists in the United States. ”