Nicolas Padoy awarded the ANR Chair in Artificial Intelligence for AI4ORSafety

Professor Nicolas Padoy was awarded one of the 43 national Chairs for Artificial Intelligence for his project AI4ORSafety.

The chair is sponsored by the French national programme for AI, which aims to offer French and foreign researchers, with the support of their host institutions, substantial resources to build a team and carry out ambitious and impactful research projects. It is co-sponsored by the IHU Strasbourg, the University of Strasbourg and the Région Grand Est. The overall funding of the project is 1.1M€ over 4 years.

AI4ORSafety aims to develop novel AI-based approaches for automatic safety checkpoint monitoring during endoscopic surgeries, enabling the development of a surgical control tower for the operating room. It leverages the strong clinical collaborations that Prof. Padoy has built with the University Hospital of Strasbourg/IHU Strasbourg/IRCAD.

Illustration of a use case of AI4ORSafety: automatic segmentation of the anatomy and validation of the critical view of safety (CVS) in a cholecystectomy procedure

 Nicolas Padoy is a Professor of computer science at the University of Strasbourg, where he began as an Assistant Professor on a Chair of Excellence in September 2012. He created and is currently leading the research group CAMMA on Computational Analysis and Modeling of Medical Activities, which focuses on computer vision, activity recognition, artificial intelligence and the applications thereof to surgical workflow analysis and human-machine cooperation during surgery. He graduated with a Maîtrise in Computer Science from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 2003 and with a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technische Universität München (TUM), Munich, in 2005. He completed his PhD jointly between the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures at TUM and the INRIA group MAGRIT in Nancy. Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral researcher and later an Assistant Research Professor in the Laboratory for Computational Interactions and Robotics at the Johns Hopkins University, USA. In 2015, Nicolas Padoy was awarded the Guy Ourisson Prize by the Cercle Gutenberg, which recognizes promising young researchers in Alsace.