The ISTU – one of the most important international symposia in the field of focused ultrasound therapy – took place this year in Nashville (USA). Prof. Andreas Melzer and Dr. Lisa Landgraf represented the project group SONO-RAY at an exhibition booth. They also chaired the “Thermal Therapies” session and presented research results e.g. on “In Vitro Effects of Ultrasound Hyperthermia and Radiation Therapy on Glioblastoma, Prostate and Head and Neck Cancer Cell Lines: Preliminary Studies”. The poster “Towards Integrating Robotics for Combined Focused Ultrasound and Radiation Therapy into the Treatment Process” gave a first insight into how the combination of ultrasound and radioation therapy could operate in the clinic.

Juliane Müller successfully applied for the t.e.a.m. mentoring-programme of Leipzig University’s equal opportunities office. For 18 month it offers a wide range of impulses for the scientific career to female doctoral candidates. During a festive event at the Academy of Sciences in Leipzig on 25 April, the new participants were welcomed by the rector Prof. Beate Schücking and got to know the programme an their mentors.

Since February 2017, Juliane Müller has been a research fellow in the DPM-group. Its goal is the support of individual therapy decision making using mathematical models. Her dissertation deals with the representation of the model as well as exploration and modification possibilities for its understanding.

On the occasion of the nationwide Girl’s Day, pupils from the 8-10th grade of high schools visited the university medicine to learn more about the application fields of medical informatics. Before visiting the ICCAS, the girls received an overview of the diverse study and work areas at the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology and conducted a small study at the Centre for Clinical Studies. At the Leipzig University Hospital they learned more about the functions and benefits of the Service Desk. At the ICCAS, Dr. Claire Chalopin and Dr. Lisa Landgraf explained how women work in science. The two group leaders are researching as physicists and biologist on new examination and treatment methods using imaging techniques. The pupils were very pleased with the insights into the digitized working world.

Dr. Claire Chalopin and a pupil during a simulated examination in the research OR.

The girls measuring their face temperature with infrared camera.

Scientists of the Digital Patient Model research group attend the 29th Medical Informatic Europe Conference in Gothenburg from April 24-26, 2018. Jan Gaebel enriches the program in the session “Knowledge-Based Decision Support” with a lecture on “System Infrastructure for Probabilistic Decision Models in Cancer Treatment”.

In today’s focus workshop of the German Society for Biomedical Engineering (DGBMT), Prof. Thomas Neumuth presents the basic idea, objectives and variants of model-based personalized medical technology, such as generic patient-, process- and system models for therapeutic decision support. Prof. Neumuth is one of three experts who gives a greater inside into the state of research, regulation, implementation and clinical application in the field of model-based therapy from different perspectives.

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DPM group leader PD Dr. Steffen Oeltze-Jafra and a researcher team from the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg earned the second place at the Karl Heinz Höhne Award ceremony of the German Informatics Society (GI).
Since 2004, its Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine (VCBM) group has been awarding the prize for outstanding research work in cooperation with Brainlab, GI and CURAC. The successful contribution, in which Oeltze-Jafra played a major role, is dedicated to the interactive sketching and annotating of vascular structures to support the medical training, therapy planning and patient education. The award ceremony took place at the VCBM-Annual Meeting in Ulm. There, Juliane Müller also presented research results of the DPM-group regarding digital decision support for the treatment and aftercare of cancer.

On April 10, Prof. Thomas Neumuth introduced the topic “Robots in Medicine” to participants of the Senior’s Academy of the Leipzig University. The talk opened the lecture series of the Senior Citizens’ College in this summer semester. Prof. Neumuth explained how robots are already be used in medical care and outlined the state of the art and the developments to be expected in the future in this exciting field.

Prof. Thomas Neumuth presents research results on the development and applicability of digital patient records for Emergency Medical Teams (EMTs) at today’s World Health Organization (WHO)- Regional Conference in Brussels. The presentation is related to the cooperative work in the EU-project Modular Field Hospital (EU-MFH), which aims at a significant improvement of medical care during missions of the European civil protection. The electronic patient documentation generated at ICCAS is intended to ease the workload on medical personnel from diagnosis to therapy and documentation in the newly designed modular emergency hospital.

At this year’s ConhIT congress, Prof. Thomas Neumuth chaired the session “Intelligent Technology in Hospitals – Convergence of Medical Technology and IT” followed by a discussion. The session provided a view toward the near and distant future of medical and surgical technology combined with medical IT. It dealt with solutions that already exist or will exist in the future and in which the further development of classical IT through artificial intelligence, robotics and ubiquitous computing and sensor technology is evident.

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At the 135th Congress of the German Society for Surgery in the CityCube Berlin, Prof. Andreas Melzer gave an invited lecture on the topic “Computer-Assisted Surgery” in the session “Innovations in Oncological Surgery”.

From April 20–21, he will attend the 42nd Congress of the Korean Society of Endoscopic & Laparoscopic Surgeons (KSELS) in Jeju (Korea). In an invited keynote lecture he will talk about “Artificial and Machine Intelligence in the OR of the Future”. He also leads the session “Artifical Intelligence in Minimally Invasive Surgery”.