The idea with the first winter school was to meet in the mountains and combine some outdoor activities with team building, lectures, and some hands-on projects. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this first meeting followed an online format but this didn’t stop the members to travel to the mountains virtually:

There were four modules covered in the Winter School:

1. Scientific based courses:

   • ‘Computational modeling in cardiology’ Joost Lumens

     Part I: Computation and cardiac modeling

     First, an overview of the main cardiovascular computation models available now in the research was addressed. Second, the focus shifted to the well-known Circadapt model and how it can be used to increase our understanding of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) working mechanism.

     Part II: CircAdapt pratical

     Use of the CircAdapt simulator (http://www.circadapt.org/downloads) to simulate valvular heart disease.

   • ‘Medical grade software design’ Stian Langland
     The lecture was divided into two parts. The first one was dedicated to techniques involved in the design of software such as the SOLID principle and TDD process. The second one focused on SW development with a major focus on the topic of peer review and IEC 62304.

2. Hands-on project

   The main goal of these projects was to get the six ESRs familiar with a topic outside of their specific research topics but always related to the MARCIUS project in some way.

   The ESRs were divided into pairs and to each team, an individual project was assigned during the first day of the Winter school.

   The projects carried out during the week were the following:

   • Project 1: local morphology – ESR 1 & ESR 2

     Goal: Learn to extract local morphologic descriptors – i.e. curvature – from 2D segmentation results

     Methods: Extraction of 2D images and reference contours from the database CAMUS, use ground truth segmentation to define local curvature, train a regression model to extract curvature from the segmentation mask.

   • Project 2: PW mitral Doppler – ESR 3 & ESR 5
     Goal: Generate synthetic PW mitral Doppler database

     Methods: Use of the CircAdapt model and COLE, generation of moving scatterer cloud in a tube according to CircAdapt motion profile, build virtual Doppler recordings from virtual MV’s

   • Project 3: physiologic ranges – ESR 4 & ESR 6
     Goal: Extraction of a list of new biomarkers from the strain pattern that can be used to predict response to CRT (extraction of strain indices from CRT)

     Methods: Post-processing of the strain data and data and statistical analysis of the biomarkers.

3. Presentation of the career development plan for each ESR

   Each of the ESR had the chance to present to the supervisors and the other ESRs, his/her own career development plan. The main questions addressed to the candidate were the following: What motivated you to join the MARCIUS program? Where do you see yourself in 5 years? What do you think you need to do to get there (skills, experience needed, etc.)?

   This workshop leads to meaningful interactions between the supervisors and the ESR, especially when comparing the experience in academia to the one in the company.

4. Online social activity