The following projects are currently underway in collaboration with our academic and industry partners:
Projects
Projects Description
Minimally invasive surgeries using endoscopes allow to reduce the necessary follow-up care as well as the restrictions for patients after surgical procedures. However, due to the limited visibility and lack of haptic feedback, these surgeries can be more challenging for physicians. Therefore, the goal of this project is to support surgeons during surgery by displaying information in the camera image.
In higher tumor stages of prostate carcinoma, one treatment option is complete surgical removal of the prostate. With this operation, affected men run the risk of postoperative incontinence as well as limitations in potency. To reduce this risk, it is possible to spare the responsible nerves that run on the prostate capsule. However, with this nerve-sparing operation, there is a risk that tumor parts remain and the resection is not performed in healthy tissue. Therefore, it is essential to remove the tumor completely so that no tumor cells remain at the incision margin. Intraoperative rapid incisions of the sedimentation margins increase oncologic safety, but are often associated with increased blood loss, longer operative time, and increased costs.
Multiple conditions of the middle ear are leading to conductive hearing loss, e.g. chronic otitis media, cholesteatoma and otosclerosis, which is regularly investigated by differential diagnosis of several procedures. Current diagnostics cover only single aspects of the pathologies: Otoscopy provides a visual impression and tympanometry the compliance of the tympanic membrane, while audiometry evaluates the overall hearing performance. Nevertheless, all of those tools lack a determination of the leading origin and site of the transmission loss. Accordingly, direct otologic diagnostics enabling the localisation and differentiation for targeted treatment and improved patient outcome are needed.
To help to materialize the European bid on a true continuum in the next few years, CloudSkin pursues to build a cognitive cloud continuum platform with three main innovations: 1. The CloudSkin platform will leverage AI/ML to optimize workloads, resources, energy, and network traffic between the cloud and the edge in the face of the rapid varying conditions; 2. The CloudSkin platform will also help users to achieve “stack identicality” across the Cloud-edge continuum; and 3. CloudSkin will also contribute to prepare the needed infrastructure to integrate the new virtualized execution abstractions into the virtual resource continuum assisted by the AI/ML-based orchestration plane in the CloudSkin platform.
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer entity and the second most common cause of cancer death worldwide. Curative treatment approaches always involve surgical excision of the primary tumor and locoregional lymph nodes. About half of all colorectal cancers occur in the rectum, necessitating oncologically radical resection of the primary tumor within the mesorectal envelope. Narrow and deep pelvic anatomy and the risk of injury to adjacent anatomical structures such as ureters and pelvic nerves responsible for urogenital functions make total mesorectal excision (TME) a particularly complex surgical procedure. These challenges could potentially be overcome by an integration of smart assistance functions into robotic surgical systems.
CeTI’s central vision is to enable humans to interact in quasi real-time with cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the real or virtual world over intelligent wide-area communication networks. Such advances go far beyond the current state-of-the-art approaches in computer and engineering sciences: intelligent communication networks and adaptive CPS for quasi real-time co-operations with humans require online mutual learning mechanisms, which are crucial challenges. To tackle these challenges, CeTI will conduct unique interdisciplinary research and will address major open research topics in key areas of the complexity of human control in the human–machine loop, sensor and actuator technologies, software and hardware designs, and the communication networks as the basis for several novel use cases grouped in medicine, industry, and the Internet of Skills.
virTUos starts from the experience of developing digitally supported university teaching - largely insular solutions without anchoring in curricula and regulations - and innovates them according to the following guidelines for action: 1)Hybrid teaching and learning is a pillar of a collaborative university development strategy of the TUD, which is advanced in the fields of action Internships & Assessment Formats, Collaboration & Internationalization, and Competence Development & Open Teaching. 2)Novel teaching and learning scenarios are continuously developed by two agile innovation teams (mechanical engineering, medicine, linguistics, economics), which take into account didactic as well as digital competencies. An integration team coordinates scaling/transfer and develops the interlocking of centralized and decentralized support structures along the requirements for study program development and examination law interpretation in the HYBRID strategy. 3)Students are not only users, but also partners and designers in the above-mentioned teams and the Steering Committee. 4)In virTUos, concepts of Open Teaching as Open Educational Practices are developed in an interdisciplinary way and further developed/used across universities.
6G-life will significantly stimulate industry and the startup landscape in Germany through positive showcase projects and thus sustainably strengthen digital sovereignty in Germany. Test fields for two use cases will drive research and economic stimulation. The goal is to create at least 10 new startups through 6G-life in the first four years and to involve at least 30 startups. 6G-life will significantly contribute to the creation of a skilled workforce. In addition, 6G-life has set itself the task of accompanying the population in the digital transformation and thus making a contribution to society.
The aim of the project "SurgOmics" is to improve decision support in hospitals before, during and after surgical procedures. During surgical treatment, a system is designed to support the decisions of the attending physicians by analyzing clinical data in real time and incorporating the latest study findings. Within the framework of SurgOmics, surgical processes are to be modeled with the help of informatic methods. In addition to the data collected during the operation, data before and after the operation will also be included.
The main goal is to design an Extreme near-data platform to enable consumption, mining and processing of distributed and federated data without needing to master the logistics of data access across heterogeneous data locations and pools. We go beyond traditional passive or bulk data ingested from storage systems towards next generation near-data processing platforms both in the Cloud and in the Edge. In our platform, Extreme Data includes both metadata and trustworthy data connectors enabling advanced data management operations like data discovery, mining, and filtering from heterogeneous data sources.
