Seminar by Prof. Lena MAIER-HEIN from German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Heidelberg

Recent advances in deep learning have eliminated the need for handcrafted features carefully designed based on prior knowledge of a problem. Given these one-size-fits-all approaches as well as the increasing availability of large public data sets, one important question arises: Do we still need domain experts to solve medical image analysis problems? My answer is Yes! My talk will highlight the importance of domain knowledge for various steps within the development process – from the selection of training/test data in the presence of possible confounders to the choice of appropriate validation metrics and the interpretation of algorithm results. I will further present concepts for uncertainty handling in biomedical image analysis in which both novel machine learning-based methods as well as traditional statistical methods play a key role.

Lena Maier-Hein is a full professor at Heidelberg University (Germany) and affiliated professor to LKSK institute of St. Michael‘s Hospital (Toronto, Canada). At the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) she is managing director of the "Data Science and Digital Oncology" cross-topic program and head of the division Computer Assisted Medical Interventions (CAMI). Her research concentrates on machine learning-based biomedical image analysis with a specific focus on surgical data science, computational biophotonics and validation of machine learning algorithms.

Lena Maier-Hein received a Diploma (2005) and PhD degree (2009) with distinction from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and conducted her postdoctoral at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and at the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery at Imperial College London. During her time as junior group leader at the DKFZ (2011-2016), she finished her Habilitation (2013) at the University of Heidelberg. She is fellow of the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) society and of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), president of the MICCAI special interest group on challenges and chair of the international surgical data science initiative.

During her academic career, Lena Maier-Hein has been distinguished with several science awards including the 2013 Heinz Maier Leibnitz Award of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the 2017/18 Berlin-Brandenburg Academy Prize. She has received a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant (2015-2020) and consolidator grant (2021-2026).