Description

Open-source software libraries for surgical technologies include areas on computer assisted surgery, medical robotics and medical imaging (e.g. SciKit-Surgery, 3DSlicer, Holohub, MONAI, PLUS, KitwareMedical, and FAST). These libraries have shown great progress in the last twenty years due to their rapid innovation and adaption to new technologies, continuous release of open software and datasets for algorithm evaluation, good documentation and educational resources for students, researchers, engineers and clinicians, and parentships between academia and industry. However, research-driven technologies bring new challenges on 1) using the latest generation of hardware, 2) ensuring fast prototyping and validation of new algorithms, 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) ensuring standardisation of data quality and data privacy. Such challenges raise the question of how to transform open-source software libraries to be more sustainable, long-term supported and translatable to the clinic. This workshop aims to bring together engineers, researchers and clinicians from academia and industry to present and to discuss current progress, challenges and trends, and hopefully build together a community.

Programme

The programme will be posted in May 2024.

Learning Outcomes

Participants of the workshop will learn from the leading authors of state-of-the-art open-source platforms for Surgical Technologies, aiming to have the following learning outcomes:

• Developing open-source software interfaces including best practices of software engineering (e.g maintenance, sustainability, etc) to create clinical impact.
• Better 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)
• Better understanding of commercialising, licensing and long-term funding support to develop open-source software libraries and projects.
• Discussions on trends and the future of Surgical Technologies: how to quickly adopt the latest technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, augmented reality, high-performance computing, etc) while still complying with relevant quality standards.
• Building a community by releasing material for the workshop in GitHub repositories, welcoming anyone to join our discord sever to do networking, raise questions and share similar events and releasing recorded talks in the YouTube channel of the symposium.