MIDL Vision 2021

What was the biggest “wow” moment in your career? When you want to contribute to human knowledge, you have two ways to contribute. Either you invent new things. You come up with new knowledge. You come up with a new, novel concept. Or another way to contribute to human knowledge is to organize knowledge and structure it in a way that will be very useful for people. Otherwise, we have a huge amount of knowledge without structure. This idea comes from the French philosopher Denis Diderot. He said, " I distinguish two ways to cultivate the sciences: one is to augment the amount of knowledge by making discoveries, and it is so that one merits to be called an inventor; the other is to bring discoveries together and to put in order their relative arrangement, so that more men understand the picture and that everyone participates, according to his abilities, to the progresses made in his century ". I like to think that maybe I can put myself in the second category. Early in my career, I wrote a state-of- the-art survey of a specific field. I didn’t have any experience in this field. What I did was just go through all the papers in a very thorough way. It was a systematic review. I really love to structure knowledge, to see how the ideas evolved and arrived at some point. I sent it to the most prestigious journal, which is Medical Image Analysis. It came back with just a minor revision. I was very proud because I had done it all myself, at the beginning of my career. I was really excited that my writing and my way of seeing the topic was acknowledged. I only made a state-of-the-art just as every researcher is doing when you face a problem. For me, it was image segmentation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). I was entering this field and thinking, “ What are today’s solutions? ” “ What are the best algorithms? ” I studied for many more years. I did not have the opportunity to implement anything because I was working on some other things. Even though I didn’t practice for myself, I was able to have 21 VISION MIDL Caroline Petitjean