<![CDATA[Hes-So]]>enAiO RSS generatorhttps://www.hevs.ch/_nuxt/img/logo_hesso.4161a9a.svg<![CDATA[Hes-So]]>20440<![CDATA[Sport Innovation Challenge 2023]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/sport-innovation-challenge-2023-208272As part of the Sport Innovation Challenge 2023, Desirée Amacker, Michelle Gattlen, Marie Grosjean, and Ilona Schalbetter, studying tourism at the HES-SO Valais Wallis, were able to travel to Lausanne in mid-December and present their innovative solution to the jury. The opportunity to take part in this challenge was offered to them in the main option of sports management and tourism.

The Sport Innovation Challenge SIC 2023 was organized by ThinkSport and Swiss University Sports. This is an event to develop innovative solutions for current and future challenges in the sports industry. This year's challenge was proposed by Swiss Olympic. Around 48 student teams from 6 different Universities worked for two months on ideas for the possible organization of the Winter Olympics 203X in Switzerland.

The team of four students from the HES-SO Valais Wallis qualified, alongside six other teams from other institutions, for the final, which took place on December 14th in Lausanne.

The SIC offered students a great opportunity to gain experience and expand their network. The teams were coached and supported by mentors during the project phase between October and December and experts from the sports industry were represented at the finale, including Ralf Stöckli, Director of the Olympic Games Department at Swiss Olympic, who was also a member of the jury.

This year's challenge included four questions related to the Winter Olympics 203X in Switzerland, with one team focusing on one question at a time:

  • How can the Olympic Winter Games help create a new generation of leaders and talents?
  • How can the Olympic Winter Games generate long-term benefits for the tourism industry in Switzerland?
  • How can Switzerland help repositioning the Olympic Winter Games and be a game changer?
  • How to manage such complex and decentralized project and major event in a diverse environment like Switzerland?

Desirée, Michelle, Marie and Ilona addressed the question “How can the Olympic Winter Games generate long-term benefits for the tourism industry in Switzerland?”. To this end, they presented a product that is based on the Grand Tour of Switzerland and is intended to encourage tourists to visit more than just the Winter Olympics.

The “Olympic Grand Tour” - a product aimed at destinations and infrastructures rich in Olympic history. The idea is that travelers follow the route to the various Olympic locations, visit them, but also get to know their region and surroundings. The different destinations are complemented by AR, VR experiences or special offers in the region. The aim of this product is to preserve the memory of the Olympic Games in Switzerland and thus contribute to the legacy of these events.


 

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Wed, 20 Dec 2023 14:23:01 +0100https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/sport-innovation-challenge-2023-208272
<![CDATA[Institute of Informatics: two ambitious projects funded by the highly selective NSF]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/institute-of-informatics-two-ambitious-projects-funded-by-the-highly-selective-nsf-208196The Swiss National Science Foundation is very selective in funding research at Swiss universities. The Institute of Informatics of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis is proud to see two of its projects funded by the SNSF. Antoine Widmer and Henning Müller, professors at the Management School and researchers at the institute, are launching two new projects in the field of eHealth thanks to this funding. A brief overview of what computer technology can do for children with autism spectrum disorders or new tools for lung cancer detection.

Antoine Widmer wants to refine ASD detection with immersive technologies

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) affect more than 2% of children born in Switzerland. Currently, the detection of ASD is faced with a gender bias, with a tendency towards under-diagnosis in girls, whose symptoms are often less apparent or different from those of boys. This bias is reinforced by detection criteria traditionally centred on male studies and by gender-specific societal expectations, which often lead to delayed diagnosis for girls. This topical issue has been the subject of many radio and TV programmes: 36.9° autism in women, Vacarme Diagnosing the invisible and Dingue ASD beyond clichés.

Interdisciplinary research at the HES-SO Valais-Wallis

To support clinicians in their work, Professors Antoine Widmer of the Institute of Informatics, Sarah Dini of the Institute of Social Work and Paul Matusz of the Institute of Health are collaborating in an institutional project involving three universities. This interdisciplinary project combines child neuroscience, social work and computer science, all of which are present at the HES-SO Valais-Wallis. Professor Widmer is continuing his research work in the field of health, having already worked on Innosuisse projects, particularly with people in need of integration or with health problems, as well as with seniors for immersive therapies at home. Co-constructed with partners in the field in Valais (Clinique dis7, association Eliézer), the project will improve the phenotyping of ASD, particularly in terms of co-morbidity or detection in girls.

How can the detection of ASD be improved?

To address these challenges, this research project led by the Institute of Informatics aims to refine the detection of ASD using computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality. By combining motion analysis and ophthalmometry with AI algorithms, this project aims to identify the signs of ASD with greater accuracy. A key feature of this project is the use of mixed reality video games that create an immersive and interactive environment for accurate assessment of children’s movements and emotions. This approach combines the benefits of AI, computer vision and mixed reality to provide more balanced, gender-sensitive and individual-specific ASD detection.

Henning Müller, a partnership with the Valais Hospital

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in the whole Valais population. The teams of Professor Henning Müller from the Institute of Informatics of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis are specialised in the field of eHealth and have been working for a long time on cancer detection using algorithms. This area of research is particularly important in view of the increasing digitisation of detection systems in hospitals. With the capacity to process vast amounts of data, medical informatics can improve patient management and help practitioners make treatment decisions.

Valais Hospital, one of the most important histopathology centres in Switzerland

The histopathology department of the Hôpital du Valais is one of the largest in Switzerland. Each year, it produces 400,000 slides containing tissues observed on a microscopic scale by clinicians and has begun its digital transformation. The Institute of Informatics of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis is a partner of the hospital, particularly in the digitalisation of its services. Equipped with an image visualisation system, the hospital wishes to develop computer extensions to provide decision-making support for health professionals. Professor Müller’s team is developing an algorithm for detecting lung cancers and classifying and quantifying their subtypes. This detection is invaluable in estimating the aggressiveness of cancer and helping clinicians select the most appropriate treatment option from the existing arsenal.

Open science or how to adapt past research for future applications

It is also planned to develop new computer extensions for this visualisation system and to use tools already developed at the Institute of Informatics to adapt them. The desire of the Valais Hospital to open to research will benefit patients and the scientific community. The data used so far by Professor Müller’s teams were public and it will be interesting to compare them with local data. Co-constructed with the hospital staff, these extensions can be improved with their feedback. The main objectives will be to find out whether the tools are working properly, whether they are saving time, whether they are improving the quality of diagnosis, and whether the level of confidence and satisfaction of health care teams has increased.

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Wed, 13 Dec 2023 11:01:08 +0100https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/institute-of-informatics-two-ambitious-projects-funded-by-the-highly-selective-nsf-208196
<![CDATA[Autonomous vehicles, a story of human skills]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/autonomous-vehicles-a-story-of-human-skills-208043Do you remember the autonomous vehicles that travelled around the city of Sion between 2016 and 2018? These driverless shuttles have been tested around the world, and the results in terms of technology have been extensively studied. As for the human factor, i.e., operators and technicians, it has been poorly documented. To remedy this, Jakub Mlynar, a research associate at the Institute of Informatics of the HES-SO Valais Wallis, has secured a very ambitious Spark grant from the Swiss National Research Foundation. Working in the Human-Centered Computing Group, he is interested in human-machine interactions. At a time when questions are being asked about the replacement of humans by artificial intelligence, this type of research seems essential.

Beyond technology: life skills and social skills

Automated vehicles have been hailed as a technology with the potential to bring about profound changes in transport and the organisation of urban life. Between 2016 and 2022, according to the Federal Roads Office, ten pilot tests of autonomous vehicles for public transport were carried out in Switzerland. Although the pilot tests yield very useful results, reports and publications usually provide little detail on the practical knowledge and skills developed by the professional participants. Indeed, the operators and technicians who carried out the tests on the street solved technical and social problems and guided passengers and others on the public highway in their interactions with shuttles.

The Spark project seeks to fill the identified gaps and explore the details of these informal knowledge and skills. Moving from an implicit resource to an explicit subject, this knowledge will be obtained retrospectively from former participants in autonomous vehicle trials. By collecting the “oral histories” of these trials, the aim is to explore the social implications of automated mobility and AI by understanding how former participants account for the organisation of the pilot trials and their own involvement in the trials.

Memory as a source of knowledge

Thanks to numerous video recordings made during the tests, the social interactions between the operators and the passengers are documented. These recordings also show that the independence of vehicles is quite relative, since the operators do a great deal of work to explain clearly to the users how the vehicles work. Interviews with the technical teams, engineers and operators will be scheduled to compile the practical and social knowledge gained during the tests carried out a few years ago. Their memory will be revived by viewing excerpts from the recordings, and their experience will enrich the social history of the technologies in order, for example, to compare the progress made. This innovative methodology, which draws on experiences of five years or more, allows us to approach the research question from a reflective and narrative point of view. The purpose of this oral history is to analyze the past and understand how that experience shaped the present identity and relationship to technologies of the interviewees. Spark funds are intended for less conventional and riskier projects. Reflecting on the present implications of past interactions between humans and machines allows us to imagine how we can do better in the future. Indeed, the name chosen for this project is Remembering the Future.

Formalize knowledge and support operators in learning.

The aim of this research project is not technological, but human and social. It is a question of safeguarding field knowledge before it is forgotten, making it explicit and available to all stakeholders. It will be a question of understanding how these autonomous vehicle tests are conducted by operators in terms of work routines. “Insider knowledge” has been acquired by humans throughout the trial but has certainly not been included in the official reports. Understanding how this knowledge has been developed and transformed, and how it has been passed on and taught to the new recruits for the trials is crucial. This will help formalize knowledge that could benefit others. Thanks in particular to the SAAM (Swiss Association for Autonomous Mobility) network and the public transport operators Bernmobil and PostAuto, among others, the results will be disseminated and used.

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Wed, 29 Nov 2023 08:55:23 +0100https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/autonomous-vehicles-a-story-of-human-skills-208043
<link>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/-208044</link><description/><enclosure url="https://www.hevs.ch/media/image/3/normal/tomates_508x3391.jpg" type="image/jpg"/><pubDate>Wed, 29 Nov 2023 15:09:43 +0100</pubDate><gid>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/-208044</gid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Looking back at the 6th Point-of-Care Symposium]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/looking-back-at-the-6th-point-of-care-symposium-207862On October 26, the School of Engineering of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis in Sion hosted the 6th Swiss Symposium in Point-of-Care Diagnostics on the Energypolis Campus. More than 140 people from all over Switzerland participated in this event, which brought together representatives from medicine, industry, and research.

Exciting presentations from our speakers, discussion of current trends in near-the-patient in-vitro diagnostics, and networking with industry experts were the perfect opportunity to share knowledge. At the symposium's conclusion, Dr. Benjamin Easter, a physician-scientist from NASA's research program, offered a dream moment to the participants by addressing the health of astronauts on exploration missions. 

Also worth mentioning among the many fascinating speakers were Pierre Métrailler, head of rescue at Air-Glaciers, Andreea Wiese from Roche Diagnostics, and Alexandre Kuhn, professor of bioinformatics at the School of Engineering.

Their interviews, as well as those of many other participants and images of the event, are available in the video below:

 Photos and video 

This event was a great success and helped to strengthen the ties between the various players in the field.

The next Point-of-Care Symposium will occur on October 22, 2024, in Zurich.

 

Photos and Video of the 6th Swiss Symposium in Point-of-Care Diagnostics © 2023 by HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Laurent Darbellay) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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Tue, 07 Nov 2023 13:24:51 +0100https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/looking-back-at-the-6th-point-of-care-symposium-207862
<![CDATA[Creation of the Valais Network for Social Research and Innovation Valreso]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/creation-of-the-valais-network-for-social-research-and-innovation-valreso-207805Promoting social development in Valais

The School of Social Work (HESTS) has created Valreso, a network for researchers and professionals from the social sector in Valais. The aim of this network is to understand and influence change and social development in the canton and to strengthen cooperation between social stakeholders, the canton and the HES-SO Valais-Wallis. It will have a simple structure and will be managed by a strategic committee.  

In order to respond to the evolution and complexity of today's society, this network, together with its partners, will carry out projects that will contribute to the emergence of innovative practices and public policies that will promote social integration. The aim of these projects will be to identify current challenges (social cohesion, economic, social and gender inequalities, integration, ageing populations, etc.) and develop solutions that meet the needs of practitioners and the canton.  

The network intends to strengthen the scientific significance of social work and, more generally, social issues in the Valais, for the benefit of both those involved in the field and the population as a whole. In addition to carrying out commissioned research and offering professional development courses, it will showcase the research carried out in Valais on its website and in its newsletters. It will also organise conferences and informal meetings for representatives from research, politics and social work.   


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Thu, 26 Oct 2023 17:08:27 +0200https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/creation-of-the-valais-network-for-social-research-and-innovation-valreso-207805
<![CDATA[The Sense : newsletter #02]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/the-sense--newsletter-02-207752

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Mon, 16 Oct 2023 16:40:47 +0200https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/the-sense--newsletter-02-207752
<![CDATA[When algorithms read medical images]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/when-algorithms-read-medical-images-207665AI in medicine: danger or opportunity? The heated debates surrounding artificial intelligence, which can replace workers, should also shed light on its advantages, particularly in terms of healthcare and personalized medicine. Certain tasks that are too time-consuming and human-intensive to be financially viable can be delegated to algorithms. This is particularly true in the field of precision medicine, based on images acquired during clinical examinations. In fact, these images, intended for a specific purpose, are also used to train self-learning computer models, which require large quantities of data. They reveal the diversity of human organisms and the pathologies that affect patients.

CT scanners: when the technology that heals radiates into the body.

The research work of Professor Adrien Depeursinge's team has focused on images taken from CT (computed tomography) scanners. If repeated too often, this type of medical imaging poses a danger to patients, whose bodies absorb X-rays and thus a dose of radiation with carcinogenic potential. What's more, the images produced vary according to the scanner used and the type of settings requested by the radiologist. The images analyzed are therefore heterogeneous, which complicates the task of the algorithmic learning model. The "TCIA data QA4IQI" (Quality assessment for interoperable quantitative CT-Imaging) project aims to measure and isolate these variations in images, to make them homogeneous and erase differences generated by acquisition protocol, quality, radiologist preferences or software updates.

To safeguard patients' health, the team of researchers at the Institute of Informatics of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis collaborated with start-up PhantomX, which produced a 3D physical object. This realistic reproduction of a human body, or phantom, is used to calibrate the scanner and check variations produced by the machine according to settings or the X-ray dose chosen. The phantom has the advantage of remaining immobile, unaffected by radiation and able to move rapidly around different hospitals. Radiologists can thus check the variability of scanner images and harmonize them to improve readability.

SPHN funds personalized medicine research and promotes inter-institutional exchanges.

This research project, funded by the SPHN (Swiss Personalized Health Network), is being carried out in collaboration with Professor Bram Stieltjes of Basel University Hospital, Professor Ender Konukoglu of ETH Zurich, and Professor Henning Müller of the Institute of Informatics. The image acquisition and imaging physics skills of the Basel hospital and the computer vision expertise of ETH enabled the Institute of Informatics’ team to create the 3D phantom, select the relevant images, test the synthetic regions to be analyzed, check the stability of the model, and select, evaluate, and put online a dataset for the entire scientific community. Assessing the quality of quantitative, interoperable imaging is a cornerstone of personalized medicine, which is why the SPHN has supported this project. It is even more interesting that the results obtained are now being made available to the global scientific community.

Improving patient health and advancing research through open science.

The research institutes of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis are particularly keen to make scientific research accessible to all through Open Science. This way of doing research and disseminating its results enables openness, collaboration, and transparency, so that research can move forward more quickly and efficiently. Sharing data in this way required a great deal of effort on the part of Roger Schaer, scientific collaborator, and Oscar Jimenez Del Toro, former scientific collaborator at the Institute of Informatics, who spent hundreds of hours sorting, formatting, and labeling complex data; however, this is particularly important in the field of eHealth, as these technological advances directly benefit people whose health is affected. The interest shown by the scientific community when this dataset was put online, and during the summer university in which Professor Depeursinge took part, was evident.

Freeing up doctors' time to focus on patients.

The SPHN funding aims to harmonize Swiss personalized medicine practices, and the effort to standardize the CT scanner images processed by this research project will enable to verify the robustness of the artificial intelligence models already in use in hospitals. Using medical informatics developed at the Swiss Digital Center in Sierre, the possibility of reducing the radiation dose while maintaining scanner image legibility is being studied. Further research should ascertain whether algorithmic reading could make radiologists' work more robust, helping them to make the necessary medical decisions and, above all, freeing up precious time for patient relations.


Scientific publication: Jimenez-del-Toro, Oscar MD, PhD∗; Aberle, Christoph PhD†; Bach, Michael MD†; Schaer, Roger BSc∗; Obmann, Markus M. MD†; Flouris, Kyriakos PhD‡; Konukoglu, Ender PhD‡; Stieltjes, Bram MD, PhD†; Müller, Henning PhD∗,§; Depeursinge, Adrien PhD∗,∥. The Discriminative Power and Stability of Radiomics Features with Computed Tomography Variations: Task-Based Analysis in an Anthropomorphic 3D-Printed CT Phantom. Investigative Radiology 56(12):p 820-825, December 2021. | DOI: 10.1097/RLI.0000000000000795, https://journals.lww.com/investigativeradiology/toc/2021/12000

Dataset: Task-Based Anthropomorphic CT Phantom for Radiomics Stability and Discriminatory Power Analyses (CT-Phantom4Radiomics), Images & Segmentations (DICOM, 42.5 GB), https://wiki.cancerimagingarchive.net/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=140312704

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Wed, 04 Oct 2023 13:25:01 +0200https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/when-algorithms-read-medical-images-207665
<![CDATA[Biotechnology & Sustainable Chemistry]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/biotechnology-sustainable-chemistry-207699The BIOTECHNOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE CHEMISTRY research group works on biotechnological, analytical and chemical innovations to provide sustainable solutions.



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Mon, 09 Oct 2023 10:59:49 +0200https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/biotechnology-sustainable-chemistry-207699
<![CDATA[Sustainable Food Systems]]>https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/sustainable-food-systems-207625The interdisciplinary approach of the SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS team is driven by consumer needs, expectations, preferences and the required change of food systems to mitigate climate change. 

Our interdisciplinary team of experts work in different fields related to food technology, food microbiology, chemistry, physics and consumer sciences to achieve sustainability goals and provide healthy and nutritious diets for all.


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Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:37:52 +0200https://www.hevs.ch/en/news/sustainable-food-systems-207625