Join the MICCAI Fellows Talk Series with Nicolas Padoy
Tuesday 29th April 2025
MICCAI Society Fellowships are awarded to a small number of senior members of the MICCAI community in recognition of their substantial scientific contributions and service to the MICCAI community. The first awards were announced in 2009.
We are pleased to be hosting the MICCAI Fellows Talk Series to highlight the work of our accomplished MICCAI Fellows. Our first talk of 2025 will be with Nicolas Padoy, Professor of Computer Science, University of Strasbourg and Scientific Director, IHU Strasbourg.
Topic: Cognitive Aids in the Operating Room: Leveraging Data and AI to Improve Surgical Quality and Safety
Friday, May 23, 2025 at 9:00 AM (EDT) / 1:00 PM (UTC)
Professor Padoy was recognized with a MICCAI Fellowship in 2024 for his significant contributions to modeling, automatic analysis, and recognition of activities in surgery and interventional radiology. His research focuses on improving the safety and efficacy of surgical procedures by leveraging data and AI—an area that holds immense potential for enhancing patient outcomes. Nicolas Padoy's commitment to developing and disseminating computational models of surgery has not only advanced our understanding of surgical practices but has also improved training and assistance methodologies. His work is instrumental in ensuring that healthcare professionals are equipped with the context-aware knowledge they need to provide high-quality care.
Abstract:
Even though surgery has become safer and more efficient over the last several decades, preventable intra-operative adverse events still occur in a large number of cases. In this talk, I will present how intra-operative data in operating rooms (ORs) can be leveraged to detect, analyze, and support surgical activities. In particular, I will highlight how artificial intelligence can improve surgical quality and safety by providing clinicians and staff with cognitive aids that can enhance the performance of timeout and safety procedures, both within the OR by analyzing team activities and within the patient by analyzing tool tissue interactions. I will present recent unsupervised approaches aimed at analyzing video data captured from multiple room and endoscopic cameras and at scaling AI deployment in surgery by reducing dependency on annotations and expanding to a broader range of clinical applications. I will conclude with our current efforts to build a generalist vision-language model for surgery, trained using supervisory signals derived from surgical video lectures available on e-learning platforms, that can tackle in a zero-shot manner multiple surgical tasks and procedures without fine-tuning. By integrating all these approaches, we aim to build a surgical control tower for the OR of the future that is able to understand surgical processes and assist surgical teams, thus improving surgical care for patients.
Biography:
Nicolas Padoy is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Strasbourg, France, and the Scientific Director as well as Director of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Research at the IHU Strasbourg, a leading institute for minimally invasive surgery. He leads the CAMMA research group (Computational Analysis and Modeling of Medical Activities), which focuses on leveraging multimodal data from operating rooms with machine learning and computer vision to develop cognitive assistance systems and enhance human-machine collaboration. His research aims to improve the safety, quality, and efficiency of surgical procedures. In 2020, Nicolas Padoy was awarded a national AI Chair by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) for his project AI4ORSafety and, in 2023, a prestigious European ERC Consolidator Grant for his project CompSURG. He was elected MICCAI Fellow in 2024 and is currently General Chair of the international IPCAI conference. Nicolas Padoy completed his PhD in 2010 jointly between the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and INRIA/University Henri Poincaré, France. Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral researcher and later an Assistant Research Professor in the Laboratory for Computational Interactions and Robotics at the Johns Hopkins University, USA.