This three-year REU Site program at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital (JHU/H) is multidisciplinary and offers undergraduate participants the ability to conduct research in a variety of fields and develop strong teamwork collaboration skills. During a ten-week summer session REU students will engage in exciting and challenging research projects in a wide range of engineering disciplines; e.g. electrical, mechanical and biomedical, computer science, and physics. Each participant will be matched with a current research project in the new Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) and will be a part of a research team, including a faculty mentor and a graduate student mentor. These research projects relate to medical image registration and fusion, image enhancement and segmentation or the development of new robotic devices to support surgeons in the operating room or to aid patients with disabilities.
In order to enhance the directed research, many additional enrichment activities are included: 1) instruction on technical communication; 2) oral presentation skills; and 3) research ethics. Additional activities include tours and trips to other labs at JHU Hospital and the Applied Physics Laboratory, the opportunity to perform laparoscopic procedures at the JHU/H Minimally Invasive Surgical Training Center, and industry tours of local robotics, biotechnology and engineering companies. Students will also participate in social activities to foster team a sense of community within the undergraduate student group. The program will culminate with a program devoted to final presentations from REU participants with their PIs, graduate student mentors, lab mates, and parents all present. An award for the best presentation will be presented by LCSR leadership.
Recruitment efforts will be targeted to potential participants from institutions nationwide, with a focus on women and under-represented minorities, and from a wide range of engineering disciplines including electrical, mechanical, biomedical, computer science, mathematics, and physics. By recruiting from and partnering with LSAMP, McNair, SWE, SHPE, and other similar programs, this program will aid in the development of a pipeline of qualified, diverse practitioners who will contribute to the workforce in the area of STEM, particularly in the multi- and inter-disciplinary subjects encountered in the computational sensing, medical robotics, prosthetics, and computer integrated medical intervention areas.
Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics (CSMR) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program Annual Report 2013-2014 In the summer of 2014, two Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics (CSMR) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program students worked on challenging research projects by interacting closely with their Johns Hopkins faculty mentors Dr. Peter Kazanzides and Dr. Noah Cowan. Students in this REU program work on exciting multi/inter-disciplinary research on clinical intervention engineering, computational sensing, medical robotics and computer integrated interventional systems. The Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics offers a very rich environment for researchers from the Hopkins Engineering School to work closely with clinicians from the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. One REU worked on the project titled, "Redevelopment of a Hybrid Tracking System" and another REU worked on the project, "How do Humans Synchronize Movements with an External Rhythm". They spent several weeks working on these projects. The "Redevelopment of a Hybrid Tracking System" project involves the creation of electronics for a hybrid tracking system that integrates electromagnetic tracking (EMT) with an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The intellectual merit of this work is that it combines, for the first time, the following two features: (1) hardware-level synchronization of the EMT and IMU sensors, and (2) an array-based EMT system with frequency-division multiplexing (FDM). Previous systems have either integrated off-the-shelf EMT and IMU units, which does not allow sufficiently precise synchronization of signals, or have used custom hardware but adopted time-division multiplexing (TDM), which significantly reduces the resulting data rate. The end result is that we hope to achieve the first hybrid tracking system that does not require a line-of-sight and is fast, accurate, and robust to electromagnetic interference.Projects such as these aid the REU in putting their engineering education into practice and working with real engineered systems. The other REU project involved performing system identification analysis of a human performing a tapping task, in which the human must keep pace with a "jittering metronome". The idea is to understand how a human follows the rhythm of a leader in a task that involves a temporal component. This is relevant to a wide range of human/robot interaction projects where precise timing is critical. By building models of human sensorimotor synchronization, we can build better robot control algorithms for interacting with people during tasks that require precise timing. The CSMR REU program is advertised widely and over the years has developed an excellent track record to attract students from diverse backgrounds. The program has been able to pipeline excellent students into graduate schools across the United States. At the time of this report, the program is aware of the following publications from the 2013 Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics REU participants:- E.K. Swingle*, A. Lang, A. Carass, P.A. Calabresi, H.S. Ying, and J. L. Prince, "Microcystic macular edema detection in retina OCT images," SPIE Medical Imaging, San Diego, February 2014. Gonenc, B., Feldman, E.*, Gehlbach, P., Handa, J., Taylor, R.H., Iordachita, I., "Towards Robot-Assisted Vitreoretinal Surgery: Force-Sensing Micro-Forceps Integrated with a Handheld Micromanipulator," 2014 IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Hong Kong, China, pp. 1399-1404, May-June 2014. Lediju Bell, Muyinatu A., Anastasia K. Ostrowski*, Peter Kazanzides, and Emad Boctor. "Feasibility of transcranial photoacoustic imaging for interventional guidance of endonasal surgeries." In SPIE BiOS, pp. 894307-894307. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2014. S. A. Stamper, C. Ploch*, E. S. Fortune, and N. J. Cowan. "During closed-loop refuge tracking, eigenmannia virescens tunes its active sensing behavior to the length and features of the moving refuge". The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2014.
