DrStamatiaGiannarou

My research is in the area of robotics and computing, focusing on robotic vision for surgical navigation. My main contribution to the field is in the development of the affine-invariant anisotropic feature detector, which has been combined with a novel probabilistic framework for soft tissue tracking in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). This is quite important because despite a wide range of feature detectors developed in the computer vision community, the direct application of these techniques to surgical navigation has shown significant difficulties. The superior performance of this framework has been validated on in vivo data and compared against existing techniques and it has been published in the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, the top peer-reviewed journal in the area of computer vision. This tracker has been used in my subsequent work on 3D tissue reconstruction, deformation modelling and surgical workflow analysis. I have been involved in the design of clinical trials and I regularly run lab experiments to validate my work. My achievements to date include:

• Real-time detection of affine-invariant anisotropic features with novel scale-space representation and probabilistic soft-tissue tracking under contrastingly different visual appearances using an Extended Kalman Filter parameterisation scheme;
• Content-based representation of MIS data based on tissue motion modelling in order to capture the semantic context of the in vivo environment;
• Recovery of free-form deformation in MIS procedures with a projective monocular camera, without imposing explicit constraints on tissue or the camera motion;
• Deformable Structure From Motion by fusing visual and inertial measurement data in MIS;
• Optical biopsy mapping for surgical oncology with no prior information of the tissue geometry combining semi model-based instrument tracking with vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping;
• Pathological site retargeting under tissue deformation and occlusion using geometrical feature association;
• Modelling and recognition of surgical gestures fusing visual and kinematic data for robot navigation.

• Awarded “The President’s Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher 2017” at Imperial College London (Jun. 2017)
• Philips/IPCAI best paper award based on evaluation by external reviewers and Area Chairs at the IPCAI 2016 conference (Jun. 2016)
• Royal Society University Research Fellowship (Jan. 2016)
• Best paper award based on crowd-sourced evaluation at the MICCAI 2014 workshop on “Modeling and Monitoring of Computer Assisted Interventions” (M2CAI) (Sept. 2014)
• Best paper award at the “Rank Prize Funds Symposium on Medical Imaging Meets Computer Vision 2013” (2013)
• PhD studentship by Selex UK (2006-2007)
• Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) award for excellent performance during undergraduate studies (1998-1999)

•  “Dynamic Tissue Surface Geometry Reconstruction for Autonomous Microscopic Tissue Scanning During Tumour Resection”, Image Guided Therapies Network Meeting (Jul. 2017)
• “Dynamic Tissue Surface Geometry Reconstruction for Autonomous Microscopic Tissue Scanning During Tumour Resection”, BMVA Technical Meeting “Reconstructing a Dynamic World” (Jul. 2017)
• “Navigation with Enhanced Surgical Vision for Robot-Assisted Operations”, Department of Neurosurgery, Hospital Merheim, Cologne Medical Centre, Germany (Aug. 2016)
• "Surgical Vision for Intra-Operative Navigation in Minimally Invasive Surgery", FORTH Centre, Greece (Nov. 2014)
• "Soft-tissue tracking for intra-operative guidance in MIS", BMVA Technical Meeting "Surgical Vision and Biophotonics" (Oct. 2014)
• "Surgical vision and workflow analysis", Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany (May 2014)
• "Soft tissue tracking", 2013 Hamlyn Winter School on Surgical Imaging and Vision (Dec. 2013)
• "Deformable Structure from Motion by Fusing Visual and Inertial Cues", BMVA Technical Meeting "Reconstructing a Dynamic World" (Jul. 2013)
• "Optical biopsy tracking within endoscopic images for minimally invasive tissue characterization", 2012 Hamlyn Symposium workshop on "Robotic-guided imaging probes" (Jul. 2012)
• "Video-based analysis of surgical workflows", MICCAI 2011 workshop on "Modeling and Monitoring of Computer Assisted Interventions" (M2CAI) (Sept. 2011)
• "Optical biopsy tracking using identification and labelling of probe region within endoscopic images for minimally invasive tissue characterization", Athens Information Technology Centre (Nov. 2009)

• Leader co-organiser of the annual Hamlyn Winter School on Surgical Imaging and Vision (2013-2014)
• Leader co-organiser of the "Workshop on Augmented Reality and Surgical Vision", The Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics (Jun. 2014)
• Co-organiser of the workshop on "Modeling and Monitoring of Computer Assisted Interventions" (M2CAI), MICCAI 2013 (Sept. 2013)
• Leader co-organiser of the "Workshop on Surgical Workflow Analysis", The Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics (Jun. 2013)
• Leader co-organiser of the workshop on "Modeling and Monitoring of Computer Assisted Interventions" (M2CAI), MICCAI 2012 (Sept. 2012)
• Contributed to the organisation of MICCAI 2009, the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics 2011 and 2012 and the International Conference on Wearable and Implanted Body Sensor Networks 2012

• Member of the Program Committee for the "Augmented Environments for Computer-Assisted Interventions" (AE-CAI) (2012-present)
• Member of the Program Committee for the International Workshop on Medical Imaging and Augmented Reality (MIAR) (2012-present)
• Member of the Program Committee for the "Modeling and Monitoring of Computer Assisted Interventions" (M2CAI) MICCAI workshop (2013-present)
• Co-chair of the 3rd workshop on "Modeling and Monitoring of Computer Assisted Interventions"(M2CAI) for MICCAI 2012 conference (Sept. 2012)
• Co-chair "Biomedical Signal and Image Processing" session at the IEEE DSP 2009 conference (July 2009)