Since last autumn, the Free State of Saxony has attracted attention with a new international promotion campaign under the slogan “Simply Saxony.” This presents special benefits and advantages of the land on the basis of prime examples.

The ICCAS can now be found in the online communication offensive as “Saxon maker” in the field of science. Professor Jürgen Meixensberger – head of the ICCAS board – explains among other things the vision of the Surgical Cockpit, there. Sandra von Sachsen – research associate in the project Structural Mechanical Defect Classification and Modelling of the Cervical Spine (HWS) – not only fits perfectly into this campaign by her name, but allows a look over her shoulder while her scientific work.

Link to the report: WE PRESENT: SIMPLY SAXONY.

More about the HWS-project

What exactly does a medical computer scientist do and what features needs a prospective computer science student? These questions served as an introduction to an informative afternoon at the ICCAS for the participants of the Girls ‘ Day at the Leipzig University.

For the seventh time, ICCAS-researchers welcomed interested grammar school girls to get a taste of science in their premises at Semmelweisstraße. There, a lot of research to touch and to try was provided. The demonstrator OR came up with surgical navigation device, surgical milling tool and phantom skull. In addition, the ninth graders experienced how surgical staff can learn surgical tools and their application in the operating room without an instrument table, only by using a tablet. On mutual recordings with a thermal imaging camera the girls found out, which body areas are better supplied with blood and thus particularly well suited for skin transplants.

The female pupils obviously had a lot of fun during their tour through the research center and were quiet amazed about the variety of applications of medical computer science in the field of computer-assisted surgery. But also for the scientists it was something special to arouse the curiosity of the prospective students via their research projects on the premises and to give advices for future career choices.

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Once a year, the Initiative Mittelstand honors outstanding IT solutions that have a high value of benefit for small and medium-sized enterprises. This year, the IT system oncoflow – developed at ICCAS – could convince the renowned jury of over 100 scientists, industry experts and specialized journalists and was awarded the Innovationspreis-IT “Best of 2014” in the category of Health IT.

oncoflow is a project of the research group Model-based Automation and Integration (MAI), which is practiced in close collaboration with ENT-physicians at the Leipzig University Hospital. The new information system has already been supporting the treatment of patients with tumors in the head and neck region for one year. Since, it has proved to be a great help for the administration, provision and utilization of patient and process data.

oncoflow creates important common interfaces between various clinical information sources. All relevant data of a patient are centrally stored and available in the form of newly structured electronic patient records. These are the basis for personalized treatments and the support of decision-making processes in the weekly tumor conferences. In addition, the integration of oncoflow into the whole clinical working process enables a further use of all present informations. This helps to facilitate the daily administrative tasks.

oncoflow means a milestone in regards to individualized diagnosis, therapy and more efficient workflows. Now it belongs to the outstanding IT products of this year in the German-speaking area.

Read more about oncoflow

On Wednesday 2nd April 13:00, Dr. Brett Bell from the ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research, Image-Guided Microsurgery, University of Bern will give a presentation entitled “Inroads to Minimally Invasive CI Surgery” in the ICCAS seminar room.

Dr. Brett Bell received a BS in mechanical engineering from Utah State University in 2003. He then began a direct PhD program Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University where he investigated biopolymers and cell biomechanics. Since 2010, Dr. Bell has been head of the Robotic Surgery group, first at the Institute of Surgical Technology and Biomechanics (ISTB) and then at the ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering, Bern.

Currently, Dr. Bell is investigating various aspects of a clinical implementation of a surgical robot system for minimally invasive cochlear implantation including safety, surgical workflow, and non-invasive registration.

On 19 March 2014, Sandra Schumann successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Evolution of distance measures for surgical processes”, which was developed at ICCAS. The event took place at the Leipzig University Hospital. Here the freshly qualified Dr. rer. med. Schumann worked closely together with the Department of Pediatric Surgery. For her doctoral accomplishments the graduated business computer scientist and physicist received magna cum laude.

Schumann came to ICCAS in 2005, when here was still conducted basic research on workflow theory in its application to surgical processes. In her doctoral thesis she dealt with distance measures, which are a prerequisite for improving workflows in the operating room by digital systems. Since September 2014 Sandra Schumann has been working at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne.

ICCAS congratulates to the doctorate and wishes the long-serving colleague continued success.

In the next colloquium on 26 March 2014, Sara Hiller (M. Sc. Psychology) from the Bielefeld University will lecture on “Learning, knowledge acquisition and study design”. The speaker is working in the field of educational psychology. She will pass on her knowledge about information processing in learning processes. The lecture will take place at 2pm in the seminar room.

From 15 to 20 February this year, Jens Meier and Mario Cypko took part in the SPIE Medical Imaging – Conference, which was host in San Diego, California (USA). The focus of the sessions and lectures, which were attended by the two young scientists, was in the areas of electronic management of patient data, patient information systems and clinical assistance systems in view of an increasingly evidence-based and personalized medicine.

In the lecture “A concept of a generalized electronic patient record for personalized medicine” Jens Meier presented the results and new approaches to the research of support systems for individualized diagnosis and therapy, which have been developed in cooperation with scientists from the Informatics and Image Processing Lab (IPILab) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. These include the provision and use of central database and complete electronic patient records, but also workflow assistance systems for the clinical practice and decision support systems to improve the treatment planning of head and neck tumors. The IT system “oncoflow”, which has been successfully used for a year at the Leipzig University Hospital, was also a topic of this presentation and received great attention.

The conference confirmed the future potential of the ICCAS-concept. The trend towards model- and evidence-based medicine was clearly noticeable. Contacts could be strengthened and expanded, such as with research institutes at RWTH Aachen and TU München.

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In early March 2014, Mario Cypko’s research trip to the USA ended sucessfully. Major stations of the journey were the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference, the NextMed / MMVR21 Conference and the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles.

The young scientist from the DPM group scored again with a poster contribution and won the poster prize of the NextMed / MMVR Conference 2014 for his poster entitled „3D++ visualization of MEBN graphs and screen representations of patient models (PIXIE II)”. Furthermore, Cypko’s presentation on „User interfaces for patient-specific treatment – decision models using MEBN“ was met with great interest among the scientific colleagues at the NextMed / MMVR. The modeling and visualization of patient data with the aim of a transparent and comprehensible therapy management is a very current topic.

Cypko’s research contributions prompted the Institute of Creative Technology at the USC to invite him spontaneously. Here he had the opportunity to present his project work at the Mixed Reality Lab and in return to learn about the local research projects. The Lab focuses on the development of low cost user interfaces for general use.
The trip concluded with a visit of the Institute Image Processing and Informatics Laboratory at the USC. The focus of this meeting was on the use of Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks for modeling of treatment decisions.

Both institutions welcomed a future collaboration with the ICCAS. Further talks will follow.

A further colloquium will take place in the seminar room on Wednesday 05 March 2014 at 2 pm, this time with the usability expert Lucas Koch. The referee is working in the Department of Computer Science and Communication Systems at the Hochschule Merseburg – University of Applied Sciences. He will present the latest knowledge about utilizable and user friendly interface development towards international standardization.

The prelude to this year’s ICCAS-Colloquium will give the renowned scientist Professor Andreas Melzer, director of the Institute for Medical Science and Technology (IMSaT) of the University of Dundee (Scotland).

The presentation entitled “Clinical Decision Support by Medical Imaging – personalised image guided therapy by modeling and simulation: FUSIMO” will take place in the ICCAS seminar room, at 3pm on Monday, 03 March 2014.