Automated 3D Human Nerve Reconstruction
Summer Research - ANS Lab, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute
I was fortunate to be funded by the NSERC Undergraduate Research Award ($5625) to work as a summer research student at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. There, I worked with Dr. Jose Zariffa in ANS Lab to develop a automated method of generating finite element models (FEMs) of human peripheral nerves. These models help researchers and clinicians simulate bioelectrical activity to aid in the design of neuroprosthetics. The current method to generate FEMs is manual and extremely time consuming. I designed a software pipeline in MATLAB to generate FEMs from histology images using image processing and ISO2MESH, an open-source library. The program reduced the time required to generate the models from several days to within 2 minutes, and is scalable with additional computing power.
I presented my research at the 2018 University of Toronto Undergraduate Engineering Research Day (UnERD) symposium, where I was awarded Best Electrical and Computer Engineering Presentation.
Contributions
- Conducted independent research for spinal cord injury rehabilitation
- Designed software pipeline and wrote implementation code in MATLAB
- Developed image processing algorithms to create 3D models from 2D image stacks
- Prepared presentations and posters for scientific symposiums
Skills
- Independent research
- Programming in MATLAB
- Image processing
- Graphic design
Check out the podium presentation that I gave at the 2018 UnERD symposium here! You can also find a poster summarizing this research here.