IBME post-doctoral researcher wins Young Scientist of the Year Award at MICCAI 2022

Dr Qianhui Men has received the Young Scientist of the Year Award at the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) conference.

The MICCAI Young Scientist Award recognizes the highest quality papers that are first-authored by young scientists at the main MICCAI conference. 574 out of 1865 submissions were accepted in MICCAI 2022 and five equal winners were selected to receive the award by evaluating the quality of scientific contribution and presentation.

Dr Men is a post-doctoral researcher under the supervision of Professor Alison Noble. She received the MICCAI Society Young Scientist Award for the paper entitled “Multimodal-GuideNet: Gaze-Probe Bidirectional Guidance in Obstetric Ultrasound Scanning” at the 25th MICCAI conference. This work proposes a multi-modal approach that provides real-time obstetric ultrasound guidance, especially for less experienced operators to improve their scanning skills on how to manipulate the probe to achieve the desired plane.

The multi-modal guidance approach learns the stepwise dependency between the real-world ultrasound scanning video, the synchronized gaze, and probe motion from the experienced sonographer within a unified framework. The novel approach suggests that the gaze and probe modality signals complement each other to reach the scanning target, while ignoring any of them will lead to biased guidance. The predicted guidance signals also allow for scanning path diversity in a practical environment.