Agile working and its values have been applied by companies for several years. The values and principles of agile working aim primarily at teams that work in close proximity, for example in open-plan offices, where the teams usually work together and communicate in daily personal meetings. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies reduced office hours and sent their employees to home offices, in order to reduce the risk of infections. Accordingly, the way of working changes significantly, as despite all the technical advances, working from home is different from working in open-plan offices. Direct face-to-face communication has been replaced by online meetings using video conferencing, chats and cloud-based collaboration. Many employees were used to online-based tools for remote collaboration, but others were reluctant to them in the past. Due to the sudden change in the work environment a need to use these tools in order to participate in business at all arose also for the employees who would not have used them under normal conditions. In this article, we present the results of a recent study, in which the impact of the pandemic on agile working is examined. Based on these results, we derive a scenario of the future of agile working in a post COVID-19 world. The study comprises an online survey in Germany. More than 170 people working in different job positions and from different branches and companies participated. The study reveals that the pandemic has significantly changed the way of working. However, people value the digital tools and find ways for effective and efficient collaboration in distant work environments.

Current cardiac interventions are performed under 2D fluoroscopy, which comes along with well-known burdens to patients and physicians, such as x-ray exposure and the use of contrast agent. Furthermore, the navigation on complex structures such as the coronaries is complicated by the use of 2D images in which the catheter position is only visible while the contrast agent is introduced. In this work, a new method is presented, which circumvents these drawbacks and enables the cardiac interventional navigation on motion-compensated 3D static roadmaps. For this, the catheter position is continuously reconstructed within a previously acquired 3D roadmap of the coronaries. The motion compensation makes use of an affine motion model for compensating the respiratory motion and compensates the motion due to cardiac contraction by gating the catheter position. In this process, only those positions which have been acquired during the rest phase of the heart are used for the reconstruction. The method necessitates the measurement of the catheter position, which is done by using a magnetic tracking system. Nevertheless, other techniques, such as image-based catheter tracking, can be applied. This motion compensation has been tested on a dynamic heart phantom. The evaluation shows that the algorithm can reconstruct the catheter position on the 3D static roadmap precisely with a residual motion of 1.0 mm and less.

Current catheter tracking in the x-ray catheter laboratory during coronary interventions is performed using 2D fluoroscopy. Although this features real-time navigation on high-resolution images, drawbacks such as overlap and foreshortening exist and hamper the diagnosis and treatment process. An alternative to fluoroscopy-based tracking is device tracking by means of a magnetic tracking system (MTS). Having measured the 3D location of the interventional device, its position can be reconstructed on 3D images or virtual roadmaps of the organ or vessel structure under examination. In this paper, a method is presented which compensates the interventional device location measured by the MTS for organ motion and thus registers it dynamically to a 3D virtual roadmap. The motion compensation is accomplished by using an elastic motion model which is driven by the ECG signal and a respiratory sensor signal derived from ultrasonic diaphragm tracking. The model is updated during the intervention itself, thus allowing for a local refinement in regions which bear a complex geometric structure, such as stenoses and bifurcations. The evaluation is done by means of a phantom-based study using a dynamic heart-phantom. The mean displacement caused by the overall motion of the heart is improved from 10.4+/-4.8 mm in the uncompensated case to 2.1+/-1.2 mm in the motion compensated case.