MICCAI 2019 Wednesday

MICCAI 2019 DAILY 10 Keynote Speaker Catherine, I would like to thank you for speaking with us ahead of your keynote speech at MICCAI today. For those who don't know, could you tell us a bit about yourself? I'm an engineer turned surgeon turned healthcare strategist. My career has passed through a few things, including most recently running research and strategy at Intuitive Surgical. In the past year, I have shifted over to running Intuitive Surgical's Foundation, called the Intuitive Foundation, where we do research, grant making and special projects. Intuitive Surgical is having a tremendous impact on our community with its da Vinci machine. What do you think makes its success so extraordinary? Well, that's a multifactorial answer. It's easy to think that success was going to be inevitable when you see how successful it is now, but it was really tough at the beginningbecause robotics was a very new thing as far as surgery was concerned. Those who tried the machine could really see its benefit, but medicine and surgery are inherently conservative fields, and so it took a while for there to be full consensus that this was the way surgery ought to be done. I think the key thing was continuing to always focus on patient outputs, and that was what made the case for it in the end. With such a successful product already, how do you and your organisation keep motivated and challenge yourselves to find new goals? What is the secret? It comes down to focusing on patient outcomes. Even though our robot enables minimally invasive surgery, and there are fewer complications compared to open surgery, we can always do better. This has driven the motivation of our research in the space of fluorescence imaging compounds to help people identify structures. We're always looking for ways togive tools tosurgeons inorder for them to give their patients better outcomes. I guess that motivation is kind of easy. As a representative of the industry, what do you think both sides could do to improve the involvement of industry in the MICCAI community and research?