Marta Kersten-Oertel
Assistant professor, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Concordia University Research Chair in Applied Perception
Marta Kersten-Oertel’s research focuses on developing navigation tools to assist doctors in the operating room. The techniques developed in her lab are used to provide more intuitive depth and spatial perception of patient anatomy to better guide surgeons during invasive medical procedures.
What’s fascinating about her current field of research is how she got there, which was through an interest in the arts. “I ended up studying both art history and computer science,” she explains.
“I became interested in how art evolved, particularly from the Gothic period, when paintings were flat, to the Renaissance, where artists learned to use perspective cues to make 2D images look 3D. I was lucky enough to meet some great professors at Queen’s and apply these notions to medical images coming from, for example, MRI or CT scan.”
In the Applied Perception Lab at Concordia, Kersten-Oertel’s team is working on developing and testing novel visualization techniques (e.g. using augmented reality), new interaction methods and the application of novel display devices, (e.g. the Microsoft HoloLens) in the clinical and health domain. Their main goal is to be able to provide clinicians with new technologies to improve the way they’re able to diagnose, plan treatment and perform surgical interventions.
“We’ve been developing augmented reality tools for clinical tasks such as image-guided neurosurgery and breast reconstruction surgery,” she says.
“I think one of the things that stands out about how we do things is that we really try to get the stakeholders involved, work closely with clinicians and evaluate the technologies that we’re developing to ensure that they fit into clinical workflows, aid the surgeons in their tasks and ultimately improve patient care.”
Backed by a multidisciplinary approach that intersects psychology and human-computer interaction, and software engineering and the health sciences, the most challenging aspect of Kersten-Oertel’s work is ensuring that her team isn’t developing tools simply for novelty’s sake.
“This is sometimes difficult because it requires close communication and interaction with clinicians and it requires us to test systems in operating rooms,” says Kersten-Oertel, who’s also a member of Concordia’s PERFORM Centre. “As you can imagine, there are a lot of hurdles to this.”
Kersten-Oertel is thrilled when she’s able to move a technology developed in the lab to a place where clinicians can use them in practice. “It can be scary but when things work, or when clinicians get excited about what we’re doing, it’s so rewarding,” she says.
“In terms of our research, one interesting thing has been the fact that the gaming industry has pushed technologies that used to be so expensive to commercial products. This has really enabled us to explore virtual reality, augmented reality, gesture-based interfaces, eye-tracking and so much more in the lab, and look at how these technologies can help patients and the clinicians that care for them.”