Familiar faces with similar minds - what else can describe best my fellow TRABIT researchers and mentors. Yes, we met again in Copenhagen in last February for a week-long workshop. And this time, Copenhagen beautifully resonated with the rhythm of TRABIT, starting from the very euphonic tune set in the last summer school in Munich.
Day 1 & 2:
The first two days were dedicated to learning MeVisLab, an efficient bridge between the clinicians and academic researchers for fast deployment of state-of-the-art medical image analysis tools. Elham Taghizadeh from Fraunhofer MeVis not only introduced us to the ins and outs of that software but also guided us to build our own exemplary module to compute and visualize DTI imaging. In the next day, we learned an important lesson on how to integrate custom built module to the existing GUI of MeVisLab. Here is a nice frame from one such session.
The afternoons were full of fun and activity. Thomas was unanimously awarded the title of undefeated champion in the table tennis arena, while some of us were busy hitting the gym, swimming pool and enjoying the nice chilly evening in the Copenhagen city. Here is a nice snap after SOTA motion blur compensation (just joking: it's the most challenging test data for next CVPR!).
Day 3:
Prof. Dr. Roland Wiest from the University of Bern delivered an intriguing lecture on current challenges on the identification of stroke and vascular disorders. The take-home message from his talk was very clear and of high-priority - “high dice is not the end of the story; we need to take account of anatomical prior and consistency”. Here is a candid moment of a deep discussion with Dr. Roland Wiest during breaks.
Mirjam Godskesen from Aalborg University made excellent use of the after lunch session to teach us how to make good use of time by Realistic Planning. The hands-on demo of “realistic planning” continued to a 30 minutes time bounded Escape the Room game organized by our host colleagues Stefano and Sveinn. Astonishingly, 15 of us “almost” achieved 33% success rate over the baseline of 30%, despite small sample size. And, of course, here is a ‘rare’ TRABIT group photo when we decided to make a Copenhagen tourist attraction famous by our presence :p
Day 4:
Julien Finet from Kitware was an outstanding tutor of ITK and VTK in python. From basic image segmentation to advanced image registration, ITK pipeline was interesting to learn and manipulate as per requirements. VTK altogether brought a completely different flavor of 3D viewing and ad-hoc interaction. Julien was relentless all the time in answering everyone’s doubt and checking their implementation by himself.
Day 5:
Prof. Dr. Mark Mühlau from TUM gave a comprehensive overview of the MS imaging from a clinical perspective. The talk was equally informative and intriguing from an engineering point of view as well.
The last but not least, the final session was on research integrity and conducted by Merian Skouw Haugwitz from DTU. The session was completely interactive where we actively took part in delving into some of the really challenging situations a researcher might face in the early stage of his/her career. Here is a tensed moment captured during a “heated” argument amongst a hung jury on a controversial academic issue.
Endnote:
This was an amazing week for all of us with countless memories and tons of discussions and an endless fun in between. As all amazing event comes to an end, so does our Copenhagen workshop. However, it would never have been successful without Koen’s all-round effort in organizing and running the workshop. We express our heartfelt gratitude to him for the warmhearted hospitality and hope to see him with all of us in the upcoming summer school in Lausanne.
Good luck to everyone for MICCAI! See you in June.
~Supro