Division of Computer Assisted Medical Interventions

The mission of our division is to improve the quality of interventional healthcare and its value computationally. Our vision is to support physicians throughout the entire process of disease diagnosis, therapy and follow-up with the right information at the right time. To this end, our multidisciplinary group builds upon principles and knowledge from a diversity of research fields including computing, physics, mathematics and medicine. Current activities are related to the following core areas.

Augmented reality: Key challenges in interventional tumor diagnosis and therapy consist of the detection and discrimination of malignant tissue as well as the precise navigation of medical instruments. Our goal is to revolutionize clinical interventional imaging based on novel image acquisition and analysis methods. Our methodology involves recent biophotonics techniques including multispectral optical and optoacoustic imaging as well as modern machine learning techniques and allows for Augmented Reality visualization of a range of important morphological and functional parameters such as critical structures and blood oxygenation.

Surgical data science: Our vision is to observe everything occurring within and around the treatment process in order to provide context-aware assistance to the physicians. To move towards objective decision-making based on data from heterogeneous sources, we are working on innovative concepts for large-scale data acquisition, annotation and processing.

Clinical Translation: To pave the way for clinical translation of our work, all of our projects are conducted in close collaboration with clinical collaborators. Acquisition of translational funding enables us to pursue our long-term goal of ultimately improving the quality and safety of the patient experience.