MICCAI 2019 Wednesday

MICCAI 2019 DAILY 11 Catherine Mohr I actually think industry and academia work fairly well together. That's generally been my experience, but then I'm in a role that bridges both, so perhaps I see the more cordial ends of it. As a Foundation, we're a grant-making body, so we tend to fund research. Industry relies on academia, not just for doing research in areaswhere it can't afford todo that sort of very far-reaching, curiosity- driven research, but also because everyone that you hire needs to come through these training programmes. Throughout my work at Intuitive, it's always been important to us to have a very good relationship. Of course, the involvement of industry should go far beyond being a sponsor. How do you create a system where industry is a real partner in finding new technologies? I have felt that when we sponsor, it's not a hands-off, here's the money, go and do research type thing. It's collaborative. You'll notice when Intuitive interacts or works with a group, if patents come out of it, there tends to be both people from Intuitive and from the university on the patents. When papers get written, members of both sides are on those papers. I feel that we do very collaborative research. you give that profession in order Regarding medical equipment manufacturers, what advice would to progress towards better patient outcomes? That's going to be the subject of quite a bit of my keynote. One of the key concepts that I will be introducing is the idea of fast infrastructure versus slow infrastructure. Infrastructure in this case is not just buildings and roads; it's the educational infrastructure, the universities themselves, the educational infrastructure leading into students comingintouniversities, oreducation delivery systems, such as delivery of care. A fast infrastructure device is something like a vaccine, or an antibiotic, where it's very complicated where you make it, but it's very easy to deploy and it's very easy to teach people how to use it. On the flip side, a lot of surgical technologies, and a lot of the technologies we've developed in the last few years, are both complicated to make but also heavily reliant on educational and hospital infrastructure to be able to deploy. The more you rely on that infrastructure being there, the more barriers there are to the deployment of that particular technology. Cell phones are an excellent example of a very fast infrastructure. You create them and they're very easy to deploy. We've seen them go from zero in the 80's because they hadn't been invented yet, to some "It comes down to focusing on patient outcomes."