&
funded under the Excellence Initiative program
As the year draws to a close, we want to take a moment to thank you for all your contributions, and the support, and energy you have brought to the ITI HealthTech. We wish you a joyful and restful end to the year and look forward to all the exciting things to come in 2025.
In early 2024, the 15 ITI at the University of Strasbourg underwent a thorough evaluation procedure led by an international, multi-disciplinary jury. The evaluation procedure was comprised of a 20-page dossier, including a SWOT analysis, and a panel interview between the jury and five members of the ITI
governance.
After 3.5 years of hard work, we are pleased to announce that HealthTech has been renewed for 4 more years of scientific and academic advancements. We would like to thank each and every member for their engagement and support in helping HealthTech develop and we look forward to all that will come next.
To read more about the ITI project and the mid-project evlauation, check out this special edition of Savoir(s) : Evaluation à mi-parcours des ITI: une excellence confirmée par le jury international.
The 4th annual HealthTech Day took place on November 7th at Télécom Physique Strasbourg with over 100 of our colleagues, PhD students, and Master's students in attendance. The day featured a keynote presentation by Emmanuel Vincent, senior research scientist at INRIA and coordinator of the ENACT AI Cluster, as well as presentations from permanent researchers and PhD students. We would like to thank all of our presenters for sharing their work and our colleagues and students for taking part in a day of scientific exchange.
For those who were unable to attend Emmanuel Vincent's keynote presentation or who would like to revisit his presentation, you can find his slides here.
We would also like to congratulate second-year PhD student, Mouhamad Abou Hamdan, who was awarded the best oral presentation by a young researcher for his presentation on patient-specific finite element modeling to simulate 3D tooth movement in orthodontics.
We are currently in the process of updating our membership lists for permanent members, CDD and post-docs, and PhD students. Team leaders have received an email with the current membership list for their respective team. Incoming PhD students who are researching a subject related to HealthTech and who are supervised by at least one member of HealthTech are automatically considered part of the consortium.
For permanent members wishing to join the HealthTech network, please send a short email to iti-healthtech[at]unistra.fr to explain your motiviation and submit a project to the call for proposals for Master's research projects, which will open in spring 2025.
The 2025 call for PhD project proposals is open from December 1st through February 10th. All applications must be complete and received before the end of the day (23h59) on Feburary 10th. Projects will be evaluated for eligibility at the end of February and PI will be notified of advancement to the second stage by the first week of March. Auditions will be held in May/June. Contracts will start October 1st, unless an alternative start date has been agreed upon.
To apply, please review the instructions and complete the application.
For more information about the call or your eligibility, please contact iti-healthtech[at]unistra.fr .
The call for proposals for projects requiring platform support is a rolling call and projects are evaluated on a quarterly basis.
The first evaluation session will be held at the end of March 2025 (June, September, November/December). Applications must be sent to iti-healthtech[at]unistra.fr a minimum of two weeks prior to the evaluation date. Candidates will be notified of results within the two weeks following the evaluation.
The application form must be complete; no incomplete applications will be accepted. Applications that do not follow the page limits will not be considered. In the case that the project is selected, the short summary will be displayed on the HealthTech website.
To submit a proposal, please review the instructions, and complete and submit the application.
The call for jointly-funded projects between the IHU and HealthTech resulted in the funding of 5 projects, with a maximum duration of 12 months and maximum funding of 15k euros per project.
The funded projects are:
BETA researcher and HealthTech member, Quitterie Roquebert, was one of seven researchers in 2023 to be awarded the Guy Ourisson prize. This prize is a 5k euro award for promising young researchers in Alsace under 40 years old.
To read the press release, check out the Cercle Gutenberg article.
Recent PhD graduate, Emmanuel Martins Seromenho, working on the development of a new full-field optical coherence tomography system for imaging in-vivo biological tissues, was named one of the winners of the 2024 "Mature Your PhD" campaign organized by the SATT Conectus and joined the 2024 cohort of the CNRS RISE program, which provides support for the creation of start-up companies.
For the press releases, please visit:
Recent PhD graduate, Valentina Scarponi (defense date 09/12/2024) presented her paper entitled "FBG-Driven Simulation for Virtual Augmentation of Fluoroscopic Images During Endovascular Interventions" at the 2024 MICCAI Workshop AE-CAI | CARE | OR 2.0 for which she and her co-authors were awarded the Outstanding Paper Award.
The 2024 call for PhD project proposals resulted in 12 eligible projects, based on the criteria of interdisciplinarity and medical need. Due to the excellence of the candidates selected by the PI, all 12 candidates were auditioned in early June, of which 5 were awarded funding.
Of the 5 funded candidates:
One additional candidate, from the 2023 call for PhD project proposals cycle, is listed here due to his start date in early 2024.
We met all our incoming and ongoing PhD students at an event on December 11th to welcome them to the consortium and network with their fellow PhD students.
We look forward to seeing all that our PhD students accomplish in their tenure with us.
On September 10th, HealthTech welcomed the incoming and rising class of Master's students with a welcome presentation and coffee morning. The incoming students were selected for the excellence of their academics and their motivation to pursue technological advancements in healthcare. The fifteen Fellows and the two exchange students from Polytechnique Montréal come from 10 countries, in possibly the most diverse cohort to-date.
The annual call for Master's research project proposals had another year of great success, with twenty-two research project options for thirteen incoming M2 students.
On September 12th, project supervisors and M2 students met in a speed-dating-style format to talk about the proposed projects. For a look at the variety of projects and supervisor/Master's student pairings, check out: our 2024-2025 projects.
The next call for Master's research project proposals is expected to open in March/April 2025.
As part of our international outreach, HealthTech and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel have signed a Swiss European Mobility Programme Inter-Institutional Agreement. This agreement, which took effect starting Sept. 1st, allows for several types of exchanges including:
One HealthTech M2 student will undertake his M2 internship with the Competence Cluster Lasers & Robotics.
On Thursday Nov. 28th, a delegation of PhD and Master's students, led by N. Gerig from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel, visited the IHU to learn more about the research activities that take place there.
One new 2024 initiative was the creation of the Young Researchers' Committee, headed by 3rd-year PhD students Aude Loumeaud and Alexandre Stenger, 2nd-year PhD student Laetitia Rebiere, and post-doc Samuel Berthe. In 2024, they organized several events (spring 2024: Master's-PhD meetup, summer 2024: Master's thesis defense workshop for M2 students), and have big plans to further animate the HealthTech student network in the coming years.
For scientific or social event suggestions, feel free to reach out to the team at iti-healthtech-student-board[at]unistra.fr.
Véronique Schaeffer, professor of management sciences and deputy director of the BETA laboratory, has joined HealthTech's executive committee, taking over for Patrick Llerena, also from the BETA. Véronique's research focuses on the strategic management of cooperative ventures and the relationships between academic research, business, and society, with particular interest in innovation intermediaries.
Research
Collaborations
Recruitment
Baptiste Kraehn, "Integrated material-process approach applied to the design of soft fingers for dexterous manipulation"
Guillaume Lods, "Continuum robots compliance modeling and exploitation - Application to concentric tubes robots"
Anne Josset, "Magnetic Resonance (MR) thermometry for the monitoring of thermal ablations in soft tissues"
Valentina Scarponi, "Towards Autonomous Endovascular Surgery: Development of Assistance Tools for Computer-Aided Intervention"
Assaad Zeghina, "Frequent Spatiotemporal Motif Mining in Large Graphs Using Deep Learning Methods"
Sidaty El Hadramy, "AI-enabled IVUS-guided augmented reality for liver surgery"
Pierre Galmiche, "Functional Map-Based Shape Collection Matching and Analysis for Modeling Breast Shape Evolution During Radiotherapy"
Emmanuel Martins Seromenho, "Optical and Elastic Tomography of Biological Tissues In-Vivo"
Ounay Ishak, "Magnetic Resonance Cavitation Imaging for the Monitoring of Ultrasound Therapies"
Rodolphe Migneret, "Development and characterization of nanofibrous membranes for the treatment of congenital diaphragmatic hernia"
Ben Cissoko, "Adaptive Time-Aware LSTM for Predicting and Interpreting ICU Patient Trajectories from Irregular Data"
Zeeshan Nisar, "Semi-autonomous Arm-body Control of Flexible Steerable Intraluminal Robots in Complex Surgical Procedures"
Roman Perrin, "Hierarchical multi-scale structures for histological image analysis"
Diletta Abbonato, "The Role of Artificial Intelligence for Societal Challenges"
Fernando Gonzalez Herrera, "Semi-autonomous Arm-body Control of Flexible Steerable Intraluminal Robots in Complex Surgical Procedures"
Anja Pantović, "Optimizing SEEG Interventions - A Deep Learning Approach for Automated Electrode Placement and Localisation"
Loïc Mosser
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