Description

Open-source software libraries for surgical, biomedical, and artificial intelligence technologies have made remarkable progress, fuelled by rapid innovation and their ability to quickly adapt to emerging technologies. This success has been made possible by the growth of partnerships between academia, healthcare centres, and industry, alongside the continuous release of open-source software, algorithms, models, datasets, and comprehensive documentation. Furthermore, the global accessibility of open-source initiatives ensures that people worldwide can benefit from cutting-edge advancements in healthcare, promoting tools that are more transparent, equitable, and accessible to all. By fostering the development of open-source tools, we have witnessed the empowerment of students, researchers, engineers, and clinicians to collaborate, innovate, and drive meaningful improvements in healthcare outcomes.

However, the rapid advancement of research-driven technologies, combined with the need to balance innovation with regulation and the challenges of clinical translation such as costs and long-term timelines, introduces several new challenges: 1) ensuring fast prototyping and validation of new algorithms, 2) ensuring the standardisation of data quality and the protection of data privacy, 3) dealing with fragmented source code for heterogenous systems, 4) enabling high performance of medical image computing and visualisation in the operating room, and 5) using the latest generation of software and hardware.

We believe that open-source software libraries hold great potential to transform healthcare by evolving into sustainable, long-term-supported tools that are well-suited for clinical applications. This workshop aims to bring together engineers, researchers, and clinicians from academia and industry to share their innovative work through keynote talks, technical talks, spotlight presentations, abstract papers and poster sessions, accompanied by awards. This workshop offers a valuable opportunity to discuss progress and challenges, explore emerging trends, and collaboratively build a strong and enduring community dedicated to advancing healthcare solutions.

Programme

The programme will be published in May.

Learning Outcomes

Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to learn, discuss, and connect with leading experts in open-source platforms for surgical, biomedical, and AI technologies. The key learning outcomes include:

• Engaging discussions on emerging trends of surgical, biomedical, and AI technologies, focusing on how to rapidly adopt cutting-edge advancements (e.g., artificial intelligence, augmented reality, high-performance computing) while ensuring compliance with relevant quality standards.

• Developing and maintaining open-source software interfaces while adhering to best practices in software engineering to drive clinical impact (e.g., sustainability, community building, securing funding, and more).

• Understanding of good practices for clinical translation including solutions to integrate preoperative and intraoperative data (e.g., tracking systems and clinical hardware) and protocols to handle clinical data for computer assisted surgical technologies (e.g. ensuring patient privacy).

• Understanding of strategies for commercialization, licensing, and securing long-term funding to support the development and sustainability of open-source software libraries and projects.

• Continue building a vibrant community by sharing workshop materials through GitHub repositories [https://github.com/oss-for-surg-med-ai-tech], welcoming anyone to join our Discord server for networking, discussions, and event sharing [https://discord.gg/PPTuExCQ], and proving access to recorded talks on the symposium’s YouTube channel.