Aditya wins honorable mention for his poster at this year's SPIE Medical Imaging conference

VIU graduate student Aditya Jonnalagadda's poster on using neural networks to search for possible tumors in medical images wins honorable mention at annual SPIE conference

February 26, 2020
Aditya proudly shows off his award-winning poster and the ribbon that proves it.
Aditya proudly shows off his award-winning poster and the ribbon that proves it.

VIU graduate student Aditya Jonnalagadda has been awarded with a highly competitive honorable mention for his poster at this year's recently concluded annual SPIE Medical Imaging Conference held by the international society for optics and photonics. Aditya presented his work showing how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can approximate ideal observer performance for searching for possible tumors in digital breast tomosynthesis images. Further, Aditya showed that CNNs, unlike linear model observers, are able to learn to discount "distractor" regions that arise from the "correlated noise" properties of the image's non-tumor anatomical background structure.

The conference–held this year in Houston between the 15th and 20th of February–features "the latest information [sic] presented by leading researchers in image processing, physics, computer-aided diagnosis, perception, image-guided procedures, biomedical applications, ultrasound, informatics, radiology and digital pathology, with an increased focus on fast emerging areas like deep learning, AI, and machine learning." The conference was also attended by VIU members Dr. Craig Abbey and Dr. Miguel Lago. Next year's 2021 conference will be held in San Diego from February 13th through the 18th. Congratulations to Aditya!