The 8th edi­tion of the UTC Bio­med­ical Meet­ing was held on Jan­u­ary 23, 2026 at the Daniel Thomas Inno­va­tion Cen­tre. The theme focused on the con­tri­bu­tions of mod­el­ling to sur­gi­cal prac­tices. A look back at this live event, which was also streamed live over UTC’s networks.

Isabelle Claude, a lec­tur­er at UTC’s BMBI lab­o­ra­to­ry spe­cial­iz­ing in med­ical image pro­cess­ing and Jean-Matthieu Prot, research sci­en­tist-cum-lec­tur­er at the BMBI lab­o­ra­to­ry and head of the Bio­me­chan­ics & Bio­ma­te­ri­als pro­gramme, orga­nized a new edi­tion of the Bio­med­ical Ren­dezvous. This time, the focus was on mod­el­ling in the ser­vice of surgery: its prospects and eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. Among the speak­ers invit­ed to the lec­tures and round­table dis­cus­sion were Pauline Elie, ethics advi­sor on health data law at AP-HP, as well as Pro­fes­sor Marie-Chris­tine Ho Ba Tho, from UTC’s BMBI lab­o­ra­to­ry, and Michel Lefranc, neu­ro­sur­geon at the Amiens-Picardie Uni­ver­si­ty Hos­pi­tal. Mahaut de Villepin, Direc­tor of the health­care solu­tions port­fo­lio at Das­sault Sys­tèmes and a UTC grad­u­ate, also gave a pre­sen­ta­tion on vir­tu­al twins and the trans­for­ma­tion of med­ical prac­tice. Sev­er­al work­shops were held, notably on facial mod­el­ling tools, vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR) in sur­gi­cal plan­ning, phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal mod­els for sur­geon train­ing and the mod­el­ling and print­ing of patient-spe­cif­ic mod­els, with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of DeepFaceX/École Cen­trale Lille, Karl Storz, Marie-Lan­ne­longue Hos­pi­tal and Materialise.

Sharing knowledge and expertise

Michel Lefranc, who is also CSO (Chief sci­en­tist) at Sur­gitec Robot­ics, dis­cussed with the numer­ous stu­dents present the engi­neer-physi­cian rela­tion­ship and the impor­tance of this part­ner­ship in the suc­cess­ful devel­op­ment of health­care tech­nolo­gies. “There is con­tin­u­ous inter­ac­tion between engi­neers and the physi­cians. The lat­ter envi­sion the care, as does the engi­neer, but he/she doesn’t say so, doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly iden­ti­fy the need. The physi­cian envi­sions the tool and how he would like it to be, but they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have the exper­tise to devel­op it or ensure its safe use. And it is through the shar­ing of exper­tise and the idea of pur­su­ing a com­mon path that we can arrive at a device that is both safe and effec­tive.” For the neu­ro­sur­geon, the doc­tor is unable to devel­op a device. How­ev­er, they are able to artic­u­late the need and eval­u­ate the pro­pos­al. This allows them to pro­vide feed­back to the engi­neer and adapt their pro­pos­al. These ongo­ing exchanges allow for faster devel­op­ment of med­ical devices. “To do this, we must under­stand each other’s lives and needs. In fact, we all have cer­tain constraints—technical ones in particular—and we must be able to artic­u­late them so that the oth­er par­ty under­stands them and how we’re going to trans­form and use them in clin­i­cal prac­tice. It’s real­ly about prac­ti­cal exchange, putting things into con­text. This involves com­mu­ni­ca­tion, through events such as the UTC Bio­med­ical Meeting!”

KD