Image-Guided Fetal Surgery and Fetal Image Computing 

Dr. Guotai Wang        

[Abstract]

Performing surgery on fetuses whilst still in the womb is a risky business. Although pioneering work in this field began in the 1980s, it remains very challenging, with only a few highly trained teams around the world treating a handful of conditions. In this talk, I will introduce the Gift-Surg (Guided Instrumentation for Fetal Therapy and Surgery) project led by University College London with KU Leuven in Belgium. I will start with the clinical background of fetal surgery and research topics including surgical instrument design, imaging of the fetus and fetal image computing. Then I talk about my contributions to this project with some works on interactive placenta segmentation, fetal brain detection, segmentation and reconstruction. Finally, I will show some works on automatic segmentation of brain tumors using convolutional neural networks, which is also part of my works during my PhD. 
 

[Biography]

Guotai Wang obtained his Bachelor and Master degree of Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2011 and 2014 respectively. Then he won a full scholarship provided by University College London to pursue his PhD degree of medical and biomedical imaging. He received his PhD degree in 2018 and won the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad. His research interests include medical image segmentation, computer vision and deep learning. He has a lot of experience on liver segmentation for surgical planning, fetal image computing, interactive segmentation based on deep learning and automatic brain tumor segmentation, with several first-author publications on IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. (IF 17.73), IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging (IF 7.816), Medical Image Analysis (IF 8.88), NeuroComputing (IF 4.072), and MICCAI etc. He is a co-author of NiftyNet, an open source software for deep learning with medical images, and developed several publically available tools for segmentation. He is now an Associate Professor at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, China.