Sandy Engelhardt, PhD is an Assistant Professor and leads the Working Group ‘Artificial Intelligence in Cardiovascular Medicine’ at Heidelberg University Hospital. She introduced a novel concept called ‘Hyperrealism’ in the field of computer-assisted surgery, which is viewed as a novel form of Augmented reality. The method renders surgical training phantoms more realistic, using latest ‘deep fake’ AI-technology.  

She was furthermore awarded with the MICCAI “Augmented Environments-CAI” Best Paper Award in 2014 for a novel Augmented Reality concept to improve prothesis selection in mitral valve repair. Her dissertation “Computer-assisted Quantitative Mitral Valve Surgery” won the BVM-Award 2017 for the best PhD thesis on the German Image Processing Community.