Keynotes

Dr. Alexandra Golby

How imaging and image analysis can impact neurosurgical care

Dr. Alexandra Golby is Professor of Neurosurgery and Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. After completing neurosurgical training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Boston Children’s Hospital Neurosurgery residency program in 2002, she received the Dandy Clinical Fellowship from the Congress of Neurological Surgeons to study in France with Professor Benabid and in Switzerland with Professor Villemure. She returned to BWH in 2003 to start her faculty career. 

At BWH, Dr. Golby is an attending neurosurgeon, Director of Image-guided Neurosurgery, Co-director of AMIGO (Advanced Multimodality Image Guided Operating Suite), and Co-director of Clinical fMRI. Dr. Golby also directs a Fellowship in Image Guided Neurosurgery to train the next generation of neurosurgical innovators.

Dr. Golby’s clinical practice is focused on image-guided neurosurgery with special interests in surgery for patients with brain tumors and epilepsy, particularly those whose disease is intimately involved with critical brain regions. Using advanced multi-modal imaging and intra-operative image-guidance, Dr. Golby performs precise, minimally invasive, and personalized surgery. In addition to conventional open craniotomy for brain tumors, she is also specialized in laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT), a minimally invasive technique that uses precisely guided laser heat to destroy tumors in the brain. Dr. Golby performed the first clinical use of LITT for brain tumor in New England in 2010. This technique is particularly helpful for tumors deep in the brain or those that are difficult to access using conventional approaches.

Dr. Golby’s research involves the development and application of preoperative and intraoperative imaging techniques to optimize surgical treatment of neurosurgical patients with brain tumors. Her research is highly translational and uses structural, functional and molecular imaging techniques to improve neurosurgical planning and intraoperative decision-making.


Dr. Eyal Ofek

Haptics for Virtual Reality

Dr. Eyal Ofek is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR). His research interests include computer vision for human-computer interaction, Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR), Haptics and  interactive projection mapping. He is also the Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Virtual Reality for the area of Haptics, and an Associate Editor of IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications (CG&A).

Dr. Ofek obtained his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, founded multiple companies in the area of computer graphics, including 3DV Systems where he worked on building ZCam, the world’s first Time Of Flight (TOF) RGBD camera (later included in Microsoft Hololens). In 2004 Dr. Ofek joined Microsoft Research (MSR). He founded the research at Bing Maps & Mobile (Shipping the world’s first street-side imagery service), heading an AR team at the eXtream Computing Group. He is now a researcher at the MSR’s Extended Perception, Interaction & Cognition group.