MICCAI 2021 Daily – Wednesday

21 DAILY MICCAI Wednesday Mert Sabuncu would respond to that picture as measured by functional MRI data. She built an attention mechanism into that model. You show the model a picture and it figures out where to pay attention to in that picture, then encodes it and somehow figures out how the brain will respond to that. It worked really well and predicted how the brain responds. What’s interesting is when you look at what the model is paying attention to, it is very strongly correlated with eye-gaze data, which the model was not trained on at all. We had some eye-tracking information and we looked at where the model was paying attention to and where humans are paying attention to and there was an incredibly strong correlation. I was blown away by this! To me that was one of the most interesting themes. I get excited about finding similarities between these artificial neural networks and human biology. But for some reason, that element of the work didn’t attract the appreciation I expected it to. You know when you write a paper that you’re excited about, it gets accepted, it gets published, but then people don’t pick up on the thing that you’re excited about? I find that frustrating, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Maybe 10 years from now somebody will pick up on it and it will have a bigger impact! I am sure we will have many more surprises to come in the future from your students. I hope so, yes. I’m looking forward to it! Do you have a final message for the MICCAI community? I have lots of messages! One thing I’d like to see the community focus on more is translation. The clinical day is important in that sense. In academia, a lot of the incentives are on getting your paper out, getting a good publication, obtaining funding, and these are not strongly correlated with the effort to translate your ideas into the real world. That last mile is not rewarded in academia. Maybe we need to come up with a way to incentivize that in the MICCAI Society. It could have an emphasis on clinical translation as an area of focus so that we can award papers in that area and recognize that effort more directly. MICCAI and other societies could influence grant-giving entities to focus on translation and not just basic research because at the end of the day the stuff that we work on only matters to the extent that we can turn it into something in the real world. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t be doing any basic research, but we should value that last mile effort much more than we do right now. For anyone new to the field or struggling to figure out what they want to work on, I think that’s the big opportunity. We’ve made a lot of interesting developments in basic science or basic research, but we’re still lacking on the translation. You have launched that message out there now, so let’s see if your colleagues will catch it!