To champion the creation of sustainable, robust, and equitable digital healthcare systems that prevent the perpetuation of healthcare inequalities, ARC researchers took the lead in organising the second workshop on Open-Source Software for Surgical Technologies at the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics on June 28th, 2024.

The workshop focused on a key question: how can we transform open-source software libraries into sustainable, long-term supported tools that are translatable to clinical practice? To address this, the event brought together engineers, researchers, and clinicians from academia and industry to present their work, discuss current progress, challenges, and trends, and lay the foundation for building a collaborative community around Open-Source Software Innovations in Surgical, Medical and AI Technologies.

In this post, we are excited to share recordings of our exceptional lineup of speakers and celebrate the poster awardees from the workshop, along with Zenodo links to other posters. The talks and posters spanned a variety of topics, including certification, commercialisation, and case studies of open-source software in research and industry scenarios. This workshop highlighted the profound impact of open-source software in advancing surgical technologies and medical innovation.

Speakers

• Introduction to the workshop by Miguel Xochicale (UCL) and Eva C. Herbst (ETH) [Talk]
• Xenophon Papademetris (Yale) discussed Medical Software, Regulation, and Related Challenges [Talk]
• Kevin Cleary (Children’s National) provided a Historical Perspective on Open-Source Software for Medical Robotics and Imaging, highlighting lessons learned for managing open-source projects [Talk]
• Sonia Pujol (Harvard Medical School)  and Colton Barr (Queen’s University) presented on Open-Source Neuronavigation for Low-Resource Healthcare Settings [Sonia’s talk] [Colton’s talk]
• Andres Diaz-Pinto (NVIDIA) introduced MONAI Label, an open-source tool for image labelling and learning [Talk]
• Mikael Brudfors (NVIDIA) showcased Accelerating AI Medical Device Streaming Workflows with NVIDIA Holoscan [Talk]
• Shashank Sharma (KARL STORZ VentureONE) spoke on Enabling Software-Defined Medical Robotics Using Open-Source Software [Talk]
• Andrew Wichmann (Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures) explored Commercial Open-Source Software [Talk]
• Micha Pfeiffer (NCT Dresden)  delved into Software-Driven Computer-Assisted Navigation in the Age of Deep Learning [Talk]
• Tamás Haidegger (Óbuda University) discussed Open-Source Software Supporting Product Development: Sustainability versus Certification [Talk]

Watch all the recorded talks on this YouTube Playlist.

️Poster awardees
Congratulations to all the awardees for their outstanding contributions to advancing innovation in surgical technologies!

Best Poster Award
Martin Huber et al. from King’s College London “LBR-Stack: ROS 2 and Python Integration of KUKA FRI for Med and IIWA Robots”
GitHub: https://github.com/lbr-stack/lbr_fri_ros2_stack/
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12709

Runner-Up Awards (Three-Way Tie)

• Keisuke Ueda et al. from Medical DATAWAY “Automated Surgical Report Generation Using In-context Learning with Scene Labels from Surgical Videos” Poster in Zenodo https://zenodo.org/records/12518729
• Mikel De Iturrate Reyzabal et al. from King’s College London “PyModalSurgical. An image-space modal analysis library for surgical videos: generating haptic and visual feedback” Poster in Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/12204075​
• Ewald Ury et al. from KU LEUVEN “Markerless Augmented Reality Guidance System for Maxillofacial Surgery”

See other posters Peter Kazanzides et al., dVRK-Si: The Next Generation da Vinci Research Kit, Reza Haqshenas et al., OptimUS: an open-source fast full-wave solver for calculating acoustic wave propagation with applications in biomedical ultrasound.

Get in touch

• Join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/P6wB44Ftft ​
• Star our GitHub repo: https://github.com/oss-for-surg-med-ai-tech/workshop-hamlyn2024
• Follow our GitHub organisation https://github.com/oss-for-surg-med-ai-tech/
• If you are still interested to contribute as co-author of a coming white-paper on “Open-Source Software for Surgical, Medical and AI Technologies: Challenges and opportunities” please send an email to m.xochicale@ucl.ac.uk or raise a new issue.
• If you are interested in co-organising or participating in next year’s workshop, we would love to hear from you!

We can’t wait to see you again next year!
Warm regards, Eva, Stephen, & Miguel

#HSMR24 #HamlynSymposium2024 #Healthcare #OpenSource #ArtificialIntelligence #SurgTech #MedTech #AITech

OSPOs for Good – A symposium at the UN.

I, together with Malvika Sharan and Arielle Bennett from the Alan Turing Institute / The Turing Way and Neil Chue Hong from Software Sustainable Institute, attended at the beginning of July OSPOs for Good symposium at the United Nations Headquarters, representing research institutions from the UK.

What’s an OSPO?

An Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) is an entity within an organisation that looks after their Open Source strategy and operation. OSPOs have been set in the industry for many years (and under many different names), but it’s only till recent years when academic and research institutions as well as government and world organisations have also started to create them. Certainly, the goals of all these different OSPOs differ, but by having a common name helps to develop a fabric across them to promote collaboration.

OSPOs for good?

At the symposium, OSPOs from different entities – national and local level government, institutions and private sector – together with open source communities, think tanks, and activists, joined together to discuss how Open Source and through those varied programme offices can be used to help tackle the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ideas ranged from those that can run within specific communities, companies, or institutions to collaborations across all of them. 

For over two years now, the UN has been running an OSPO, and this event is part of their commitment to working with the whole world. The symposium gave details about how OSPOs were formed and their motivations, as well as advertise initiatives from those attending. For example, the OSPO at the UN started by a survey to all its sub-organisations to know their positions on Open Source Software, whether that’s from a user, creator, maintainer, community member or stakeholder point of view. They have grown fast and highlighted that Open Source is more than Open Source Software! Open Source covers open communities, knowledge, data, science, …. On the digital front, these were referred to as Digital Public Goods (DPGs), which I think conveys more weight than open source software or open data. A person may not understand what open source software is, but a public good resonates that it has something good for them!

On open source communities, however, many of us have the tendency to focus on the software and forget to look beyond it. How can we go an extra step and check how what we are creating can be relevant to the SDGs? That may look too hard (and even ambitious?), if that’s the case, we should have a commitment to no harm – I firstly heard it from Malvika’s talk: Applying Do No Harm principle to enhance open source sustainability at SOOCon24. That’s where many of us need to start with, reviewing our practices and applying do-no-harm principles within our communities to work towards Open Source for good.

Though many people see the goods of Open Source for the world, not everyone at is an open source advocate! Even within the UN, they’ve got challenges and myths against Open Source that are common in many other communities. Some of these are based on trusting more big tech companies or using privacy or security concerns as an excuse to prevent opening their source (whether it’s data, code or knowledge). Regarding security, however, a recent event that caused a worldwide mayhem demonstrates that vulnerabilities are not exclusively on open source software.

From understanding how UN’s OSPO works within a multi-organisation level, we moved into a state/local government level. In Germany, they are working to unite much of the different wheel-reinventions at different states into a more collaborative approach where the tools and processes are shared (such as platforms like openCode). This has not only stopped there, but they are collaborating with France too! There, the BlueHats initiative helps to promote and recognise the community behind Open Source development within government. Funding open source is a big problem, and that was discussed too – people from Sovereign TechFund and ZenDiS gave an overview of the current successful model that’s being used in Germany.

Initiatives within foundations and cities were also discussed, as well as the opportunities universities can have collaborating with their local communities on that.

One of the UN’s OSPO star activities mentioned and praised was Reboot the Earth. Five hackathons that happened around the globe to come up with ideas that can advance the SDGs. The winners from each of them presented their ideas to us, and now they are taking part in a coaching programme to scale their solutions. This was very inspiring!

Once the symposium finished, I, together with many of the attendees, participated in a 1-day workshop: What’s next for Open Source? There we had more time to interact and collaborate between us and come up with various lists of actions to keep pushing forward the idea of Open Source for good. At least, one thing was easily done: we made connections between various organisations that will convert into future collaborations.

What’s next for UCL?

Well, glad you asked! At ARC we are starting to build an OSPO to provide Open Source guidance and support to research, education, and e-infrastructure projects through the whole university. At the moment we are scoping our vision and midterm goals, but hopefully soon we can advertise our plans to the rest of the university and the whole world. Would you like to be involved? Write to us at open.source@ucl.ac.uk.

Where can I read more about the event?

You can check the event highlights, the event recordings and reports from other attendees such as Nicole Martinelli at OpenSource.net, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at The New Stack and at The Register, Nithya Ruff at the Linux Foundation, and Henriette Litta at the Open Knowledge Foundation,