Faculty, staff, and students from the Med-i Lab and the Perk Lab participated in the 19th Imaging Network Ontario meeting that brings together the best in-class physicians, researchers, healthcare professionals and trainees to present the state of the art in health imaging and its impact. Staff and students chaired from the Queen’s School of Computing, presented and participated in numerous activities. A number of students from these labs were recognized awards. The winners are as follows.
Andrea Perera-Ortega
Andrea won the MSc Student Best Pitch Presentation Award for her presentation “Machine learning to detect brain lesions in focal epilepsy. After winning this award, she states:
It means a great deal to me to be presented with this award. This was actually my first project involving machine learning and the experience I had led me to pursue a Master’s degree at the Med-i Lab here at Queen’s. I learned so much and am incredibly thankful to Jonah Isen, Dr. Alireza Sedghi, Dr. Parvin Mousavi, Dr. Gavin Winston and Dr. Sjoerd Vos for supporting me and teaching me so much throughout this project.
Jessica Rodgers
Jessica won the PDF Best Oral Presentation Award for her presentation “Feasibility of fusing three-dimensional transabdominal and transrectal ultrasound images to visualize intracavitary gynaecological brachytherapy applicators.” Jessica comments on what it has meant to win this award. She states:
I’m very grateful to have received this award for my oral presentation describing the feasibility of combining different types of 3D ultrasound images to visualize devices used during internal radiation therapy of gynecologic cancers. This award adds confidence to my ability to tell the story of my work to diverse audiences, which is important for the highly interdisciplinary research in this field. I also hope that with this award I can encourage other trainees to develop their communication skills.
Alice Santilli
Alice won the MSc Student Best Pitch Presentation Award for her presentation “Domain adaptation and self-supervised learning for surgical margin detection.” After winning this award, she states:
Our work for IMNO was focused on using the relative path algorithm, which created a two-part model that allows for the influence of added data diversity in the form of pretraining task, with a different dataset (BCC) to maximize classification performance of our target dataset, breast cancer. Winning this award is exciting for myself and the team that puts so much time and energy into achieving the full potential of the iKnife. I’m thrilled that others enjoy the work that we do.
Laura Connolly
Laura Connolly, whose research is focused on applying robotic assistance to breast conserving surgery, won the MSc Student Best Pitch Presentation Award for her presentation “A platform for robot-assisted intraoperative imaging in breast conserving surgery. ” Laura comments on what it has meant to win this award. She states:
I have loved attending ImNO for the last two years to share the work we’re doing at Queen’s with the Ontario Imaging community. I am very grateful to be awarded for my presentation in the Image Guided Surgery session and it is very motivating to find out that other people are as excited about this project as I am!
And that’s not all.
Laura Connolly, won another award. She has been noted as the the runner up at Queen’s 3MT and moves to the provincials. Laura says:
It is a huge Honour to place in the Queen’s 3MT competition among the other incredible finalists. This competition was an exciting way to present my own research and learn about the research happening in different departments at Queen’s!
Jessica Rodgers (PDF) won won the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research Rising Stars award in the PDF category! Jessica says:
I’m very excited to have been selected for this award — from my past experiences with OICR events, I’ve seen that OICR supports truly high-caliber researchers in Ontario and I’m honoured to be recognized for my potential as a “rising star” among them. This is especially important for me as I’ve found that many people don’t fully realize the role that engineering and computing plays in cancer research, instead focusing on research at the biochemical or cellular levels. I’m particularly passionate about advocating for cancer research paths in these under-recognized fields among youth investigating future career directions and I feel that this recognition of my research potential and community engagement provides me with a greater opportunity to connect with the broader cancer research community and increase exposure for these fields.
Congratulations to all our winners and the members of the Med-i and Perk Labs, and lab directors Parvin Mousavi and Gabor Fichtinger!