MICCAI 2019 Wednesday

MICCAI 2019 DAILY 4 Women in Science Besides many other things, Alison Noble won two days ago the Enduring MICCAI award at MICCAI2019. She previously served as President of the MICCAI Society from 2013-16. Alison, what is your work about? My research area is in ultrasound image analysis. In the last ten years, it has focused on looking at ultrasound in obstetrics and fetal medicine. It's been an exciting time, really, over that period of about eight to ten years, with the introduction of machine learning. We're really makingmassive progress. The reason for this is ultrasound image interpretation is all about acoustic pattern recognition, and machine learning is about pattern recognition. Putting the two together is an incredible, exciting time for us. You have already advised many PhD students. How do you think your students have changed since the beginning until more recently? I'm not sure that they've changed because every PhD student is a person. They grow and develop in different ways. All the research fields changed, I think. PhD is very much about that individual developing. How do you see MICCAI evolving? Have there have been many major changes since you were the president until now? I think what's happened, which is really very good, is that now there is very much a community. MICCAI started out to support having a scientific conference. There is the MICCAI scientific conference, and there is the Society. The original motivation of the society was the sustainability of the conference series. As the community has grown, the notion of having a society, and that being about the people as well has become a lot more important. It's great to see that we have the student component of that. That was purely initiated by the students. We just said to them, “We will support you, including financially, but we are not going to do it as senior members.” They took that challenge on, and it has really thrived. The fact that it has continued to thrive over multiple generations of students is fantastic! These days, we are also saluting the birth of the first special interest group at MICCAI on shape analysis (see