Congratulations to students Laura Doyle and Andy Wong, the first recipients of the Institute for Computational Medicine’s Summer Undergraduate Fellowship.

Each summer, the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM), an Institute in the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Medicine, will sponsor research fellowships for Johns Hopkins University undergraduate students. Fellowships can be awarded in each of the areas of Biological Systems Modeling, Computational Anatomy, and Bioinformatics.

Laura Doyle will be working with PostDoctoral Fellow Siamak Ardekani in the area of Biological Systems Modeling. The goal of the project is the registration of contrast MR images taken in one orientation on one scanner with sodium MR images taken in a different orientation on a different scanner in order to obtain information about the sodium ion distributions in infarct regions of the heart. This process involves extracting the raw data from the proprietary scanner formats, finding an affine transformation matrix to describe the registration, implementing a MatLab function to resample and transform the data, and finally performing LDDMM to match fine details of the scans.

Andy Wong will be working with Dr. Rene Vidal in the area of Bioinformatics. His project consists of implementing various image segmentation and registration algorithms, like level-set based segmentation algorithms, in C++ and to quantitatively compare the relative performance of different algorithms against each other in the segmentation of CT scans and MRI heart images.

Congratulations to both of our inaugural fellows!