The event featured five exciting presentations and interactive demonstrations, providing opportunities for participants to exchange ideas. Participants included employees from the Fraunhofer CIMD core institutes (Fraunhofer ITMP, ITEM and IZI), other Fraunhofer institutes (Fraunhofer IAIS, IGD and MEVIS) as well as external attendees.

The workshop took place in the showroom of the SmartHospital.NRW project, which is a consortium project led by the University Medical Centre Essen, in collaboration with scientists from two Fraunhofer institutes (Fraunhofer IAIS and Fraunhofer MEVIS), RWTH Aachen, TU Dortmund and the partners, GSG and m.Doc. The aim of the consortium is to develop concepts and solutions to help hospitals advance their digitalisation and become Smart Hospitals.

Following a brief welcome from Dr. Christina Gehbauer from the Fraunhofer ITMP, the event was opened by Dario Antweiler, group leader of healthcare analytics and data scientist at the Fraunhofer IAIS. In his presentation on the topic of 'Smart Hospitals – the hospital of tomorrow', he discussed the many possible applications of artificial intelligence in hospitals and the resulting changes to existing processes. He illustrated his talk with a concrete example from the SmartHospital.NRW project.

Afterwards, the 'Demonstrator Walk' offered a practical insight. Four Prototypes were presented, tested and discussed. As part of the SmartHospital.NRW project, Dario Antweiler presented a voice-controlled system for managing patient rooms, a multimodal support tool for angiography, and an AI-powered system for generating discharge letters. Gijs Luijten, from the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) at the University Medical Center Essen, presented a system that uses XR to support surgical planning, impressively demonstrating how mixed reality can improve patient care.

Michaela Neff, a research assistant at the Institute for Medical Informatics at the University medicine of Frankfurt, gave a presentation on the topic of 'AI in medical research'. She began by providing a clear definition of the relevant terminology, before giving a brief overview of the development of AI in medicine. She also highlighted current research topics, such as decision support systems, image analysis, and text analysis.

Gijs Luijten, who had already presented exciting practical insights into his work at the 'Demonstrator Walk', gave a lecture on the topic of 'AI and Extended Reality (XR) in therapy - using HoloLens 2 sensor data: XR and AI for markerless CT registration and diagnostic eye tracking'. In particular, he addressed the question of how 3D technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality, can enhance surgical diagnostics and interventions.

After lunch, there was a short interdisciplinary exchange on the following questions: 'What are the best practices in everyday dealings with AI, digitalisation, etc.?' and 'What potential do AI, digitalisation, etc. have?'.

Professor for Big Data in Medicine at the University of Oldenburg, Prof. Dr. Antje Wulff, then gave a presentation on the topic of 'Data platforms and interoperability in medical research and healthcare'. She shared some valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges involved in managing routine clinical data for secondary use. She emphasised the importance of data heterogeneity and different data modalities, as well as the complexity of data interoperability. Finally, she presented three data platform initiatives: the Medical Informatics Initiative, NFDI4Health, and the European Health Data Space (EHDS).

The event's final lecture was given by Prof. Dr. David Matusiewicz, Professor for medical management at FOM University and Dean for Health & Social Affairs. In his lecture, he discussed future visions and innovations in the healthcare sector, vividly demonstrating the potential of digitalisation and artificial intelligence - for instance, in overcoming language barriers.

The Fraunhofer CIMD would like to thank the speakers for their interesting and exciting contributions, and the participants for their keen interest and active contribution.