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Josefine Schreiter successfully defended her PhD thesis, “Human-Robot Interaction for Robotic Ultrasound: Investigating Concepts for Manual Control”, on October 29, 2026. Her work addresses a central question: how can clinicians best guide a robotic ultrasound system? She developed and evaluated two techniques for continuous end effector control, teleoperation and a touchless approach, and compared them … Read more
From October 8 to 10, 2026, the 25th Annual Conference of the German Society for Computer- and Robot-Assisted Surgery (CURAC 2026) took place in Munich, Germany. CURAC is one of Germany’s leading scientific forums for computer-assisted and robotic surgery, bringing together researchers, engineers, and clinicians to discuss new technologies and their potential applications in medicine. … Read more
The VAR Group organized two workshops, contributed to the workshop programs and presented posters at ISMAR 2026 in Bari.
The VAR Group was represented at MICCAI 2026 by Robin Urrutia and Dr. Alfredo Illanes, who presented two papers on vibroacoustic (VA) sensing as a new source of information during minimally invasive procedures. One contribution was selected for an oral presentation in addition to its poster; the other was presented as a poster. In “Where … Read more
SurgAgentXR just won 2nd place in the AI × XR for Healthcare track at the XR Creator Con Hackathon 2026 finals in Berlin! Together with Ajay Alageshan from the Visualisation Group at the University of Magdeburg and Ana Sodia Santos (external), Katarzyna Olszyńska and Prakash Pandi took part in the XRCC Hackathon in Berlin. Everything … Read more
Katarzyna Olszyńska and Robin Urrutia Escobar have been to the 6th Medical Augmented Reality Summer School (MARSS) on AI, Robotics and XR for Clinical Applications in Shenzhen & Hong Kong. This was a great opportunity to dive deeper into the topics they work on daily – robotics, AI, and XR in the medical field. Part … Read more
Wei Wei successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Towards a Liver Tumor Ablation Intervention System: Deep Learning-based Automatic Ultrasound-CT/MRI Registration” on June 5, 2026. The thesis committee included Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jana Dittmann (University of Magdeburg), Prof. Dr. Christian Hansen (University of Magdeburg), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sylvia Saalfeld (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Gerrit Zöllner (Universitätsmedizin … Read more
IEEE VR 2026 took place in Daegu, South Korea, from 21 to 25 March 2026. As the world’s leading research conference on virtual, augmented and mixed reality, it brought together top international researchers to present peer-reviewed scientific breakthroughs for the XR technologies of the coming decade. Danny Schott, Florian Heinrich and Fabian Joeres were involved … Read more
On Monday, 15 December, Tonia Mielke successfully defended her doctoral thesis entitled ‘From Registration to Evaluation: Towards Efficient Human–Robot Interaction’. The work was carried out at the Research Campus STIMULATE and examines intuitive methods for controlling robotic arms using hand gestures and the support of these interactions through mixed reality. The doctoral colloquium and dissertation … Read more
On 11 December 2025, Oleksii Bashkanov from the Human–Machine Interaction research group at the Research Campus STIMULATE at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg successfully completed his doctoral colloquium. In his dissertation entitled ‘Multimodal Deep Learning for Enhanced Prostate Cancer Diagnosis and Grading,’ he focused on the development of AI-supported methods for improved prostate cancer diagnostics. … Read more