Speaker: Gabor Fichtinger, Queen's University
Talk summary: Point-of-care-ultrasound guided therapies and interventions, shortly POCUS-IGT, enables treatment at the bedside, whether in an urban hospital,
rural clinic, or mobile care unit; potential use of POCUS-IGT in interventions like injections, biopsies, drainages, ablations and surgeries is virtually unlimited. As such, POCUS-IGT can transcend geographic and socio-economic boundaries and thus bring closer the ideal of democratization of access to healthcare.
In the global context, sustainable development of POCUS-IGT programs is dependent on the availability of free open-source software platforms, as the mean of rapid
knowledge and technology translation. This talk will discuss the role of the 3D Slicer (www.slicer.org) and SlicerIGT (www.SlicerIGT.org) free open-source software ecosystems
in the development of POCUS-IGT solutions and their global deployment though the Train the Trainer Program, an alliance between Queen’s University, University of Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria, and Harvard Medical School, working with clinical leaders, governments, and international organization toward establishing national POCUS-IGT programs in West Africa,
particularly in Mauritania and Senegal.
Biography: Gabor Fichtinger (IEEE M’04, S’2012, F’2016) received his doctoral degree in computer science
from the Technical University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary, in 1990. He is a Professor and
Canada Research Chair in Computer-Integrated Surgery at Queen’s University, Canada, where he
directs the Percutaneous Surgery Laboratory (a.k.a. Perk Lab). His research and teaching specialize
in computational imaging and robotic guidance for surgery and medical interventions, focusing on
the diagnosis and therapy of cancer and musculoskeletal conditions. He has contributed more than
700 publications, with over 14,000 citations. Prof. Fichtinger is an Associate Editor for IEEE
Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and Elsevier’s Medical Image Analysis, Deputy Editor for
the International Journal of Computer Assisted Surgery Radiology. He has served on the boards of
the International Society of Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Surgery (MICCAI)
and the International Society of Computer Assisted Surgery (ISCAS). Prof. Fichtinger received
many honours, including the Tier-1 Canada Research Chair, Cancer Care Ontario Research Chair,
IEEE Fellow, AIMBE Fellow, MICCAI Fellow, Marie Curie Fellow of the European Community,
Distinguished Speaker of ACM, IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer.
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