MICCAI 2019

MICCAI 2019 DAILY Women in Science Carole Sudre is a Research Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences at King’s College London. Can you tell us what you are doing here at MICCAI? At MICCAI, there are two things… the work that I’ve been doing on vascular lesions. Also, there is a workshop that we have been preparing for quite a long time now. It’s an UNSURE workshop on the Uncertainty for Safe Utilization of machine leaRning in mEdical imaging. That will happen next Thursday. That’s a workshop with people all over different universities. Can you tell us about your work? So I’m looking at brain images and trying to discover a bit more about vascular lesions when people age. What are these vascular lesions? What are the different types? How can we better examine brain images? How does all that relate to cognition and brain function? In case one day we will age, what should we expect? The problem is when we age, there are so many things and so many aspects that can modify the brain. Actually, it’s really difficult to distinguish any of the pathologies that we discover. For instance, you may have lesions that appear because of problems in the blood vessels. Those problems may be related to hypertension, related to some genet ic background, related to the l i festyle. You can also have other pathology going on. You have the vascular part that can modi fy the brain, but you have other issues in the vessels that are not related that much to cardiovascular r isk factors. I f you focus on what happens to the brain vessels when you age, even that may be due to di fferent things. I t can be related to cardiovascular r isk factors, problems wi th act ivi ty, hypertension, or diabetes. You may have also other pathologies. For instance, in some si tuat ions, you f ind in the vessel wal l what makes the vessel a bi t more st i ff and di ff icul t to adapt to the pressure and funct ion l ike they should. They make the vessels st i ffer and less amenable to changes. When you requi re some suppl ies, the blood vessels adapt . When you age, basical ly, there is some fat igue, and they don’ t have the same abi l i ty to adapt , to expand 14