I am Valentina Scarponi, I am 28 years old, and I have just completed my PhD in biomedical engineering. Since I've always been passionate about technical subjects and fascinated by how medicine can make an impact, I decided to pursue a degree in biomedical engineering after high school. I completed my bachelor’s degree at the University of Bologna and my master at Politecnico di Milano, where I specialized in biomechanics and biomaterials. During the development of my master thesis project, I discovered my passion for research, which motivated me to complete my studies with a PhD. My PhD focused on the development of assistance tools for endovascular interventions. Endovascular disease are nowadays one of the main cause of death worldwide and the main therapeutic solution adopted today are endovascular interventions. These procedures offer many benefits, such as minimal invasiveness and quick patient recovery time, but present many challenges for the caregiver. To deliver the treatment, the clinician needs to navigate thin, flexible devices called catheters and guidewires inside the patient's arteries to reach the target location. During the intervention, the caregiver is only guided by fluoroscopic images, which can only provide 2D information. Furthermore, the acquisition of these images, requires the use of X-rays, dangerous for the health of both the patient and the clinician. To overcome these limitations, during this PhD thesis we proposed two systems: one that provides additional information directly on the fluoroscopic images and another that autonomously navigates surgical tools. The first one is essentially an assistance system, which overlaps the classical fluoroscopic images with information about the anatomy that is being navigated and shows the clinicians the predicted outcome of their actions before they perform them. The second one is a Deep Reinforcement Learning controller which aims to autonomously perform the procedure by controlling an endovascular surgical robot. Currently, these robots function only as leader-follower devices, which are not able to provide additional support to the caregiver during the procedure.
Pursuing this PhD has allowed me to grow significantly, both personally and professionally. Over the past three years, I have learned how to organize and manage the various steps required to develop a project—an essential skill in any field. This PhD gave me the opportunity to deepen my knowledge and gain experience in areas I was already familiar with, such as biomechanics, while also exploring new subjects like Deep Reinforcement Learning, which is becoming increasingly important in both research and industry. I was also lucky enough to have the opportunity to collaborate with the Korean company LN Robotics, which develops robots for percutaneous coronaries intervention. They provided us with one of their robots to test the algorithms I developed during my thesis, allowing me to see my work applied in the real world and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges involved in developing real-world applications.
During these three years, thanks to the support of ITIHealthTech, I had the great opportunity to participate in three international conferences: IROS, MICCAI and IPCAI. On these occasions, I presented my work and connected with a community of researchers in the same field. Presenting at conferences also helped me improve my communication skills, teaching me how to effectively share my work and speak confidently in front of an audience. These experiences have been incredibly enriching and full of interesting discussions. It has been amazing to build connections with people working on similar subjects and exchanging ideas to further develop our respective work. Moreover, these conferences have been an amazing opportunity to travel, explore new cities and countries, and experience different cultures. ITIHealthTech also gave me the chance to serve as assistance professor in some of the courses within its master program, and to be one of the supervisors of the master thesis project of one of ITIHealthTech’s students. This experience helped me better understand how to organize a complex project involving multiple aspects and how to work effectively in a team. As I have already mentioned, this PhD has not only been an incredible chance to develop important hard skills, but it has also been a unique opportunity for personal growth. Strasbourg is an international city and living there for three years allowed me to meet people from different backgrounds and countries, and to develop friendships that I really hope I will be able to cultivate also in the future.
The experience of the PhD has been invaluable for me, and I will always be grateful to my supervisors, Stéphane Cotin, Florent Nageotte and Michel Duprez, for supporting me and giving me the opportunity to develop this work, and to ITIHealthTech for financing this project.
I am now very excited for the next step in my career. In March, I will start working as a researcher at the Zeiss InnovationHub in Karlsruhe. Carl Zeiss is a leader in the production of optical and optoelectronic material and working as a researcher in such a prestigious company has always been one of my dreams. This opportunity would not have been possible without the experience and skills I gained during my doctoral studies.