This blog will describe how I spent my last week at Hyderabad. Experienced and got to see a lot of things in just one week. 24th June in the morning I reached Hyderabad from Bangalore by bus. This was a first time experience for me traveling from one unknown city to another unknown city alone by bus in an over night journey.
At Hyderabad my dad's batch-mate also a very good friend arranged a visit to NFC for me on my first day. NFC is Nuclear Fuel Complex where I got to see the manufacturing of fuel rods starting from scratch where natural Uranium is converted to Uranium dioxide pellets that were then filled into the zirconium alloy tubes and after undergoing a lot of tests and processing they were bundled into a fuel assembly. Even the tubes and sheet of various dimensions were manufactured at the same place in such different procedures that I had never heard of before. Obviously a day long plant visit like this is tiring but trust me it was worth while. In the evening I took an Uber to reach Banjara Hills where we were accommodated for the week by L V Prasad Eye Institute. And the real story starts here :P
This year witnessed the fifth edition of Engineering the Eye Hackathon organised by L V Prasad Eye Institute and MIT Media Labs. I was so happy and lucky to get selected for this. So I got to the accommodation and met my two room mates Sneha who is my classmate as well and Divya a very dynamic girl with whom I got introduced for the first time there and never did I imagine that I would be sharing so much of beautiful memories with them over the week.
Next day in the morning all the participants, mentors and the clinical mentors assembled in the auditorium on the 6th floor of the hospital. (well the balcony had a nice view of Hyderabad here...)
We first had a mandatory introductory round where I realized I was among a very diverse and highly knowledgeable group of people of which many were Machine learning enthusiasts (well ML and image processing became the buzz word for the hackathon) from different colleges all over India and knew that this was the best place to network and build connections. After that Dr. Anthony Vipin Das took over the stage and welcomed all of us with such energy and shared the story of how Srujana-The Centre for Innovations was born and the journey so far. If you happen to visit LVPEI ever then you would notice that the ground floor just when you enter the campus is given to Srujana, so that is the amount of importance given to Innovations in Health-Care. A glimpse of Srujana:
Coming back to Dr. Vipin, I am glad that I met him because he is such an amazing doctor, researcher, innovator, TED speaker and I am totally amazed at his research and all his works. Have a look at this to know it for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzBTBAoAFE0&t=67s
It was a pleasure to hear Dr. Pravin (from Tej Kohli Cornea Institute), Dr. Nandini, Dr. Ashutosh, Dr. Jagdish and Dr. Subhadra (Specialist in preventing blindness among premature babies) speak about their work and constantly encouraging us to take up problems in eye-care and build effective solutions towards it. Following them the 4 team lead technologists of Srujana, Sankalp, Koteshwar, Sandeep and Ashish spoke about their totally commendable work and their projects at Srujana. By now you all might have got an idea that this was not merely a hackathon but also a place where we got introduced to great personalities who guided us totally and were very open to all our questions, like we got to hear Dr. Ramesh Raskar (Head of Camera Culture Group at MIT Media Labs), Prof Ramesh Loganathan (IIIT Hyderabad), Prashant Gupta (from Microsoft) and Mr. Annamalai (from CYIENT) speak. We had Dr. Sangwan (Director of Srujana) talking to us the second day and who was by our side for the rest of the week constantly motivating us and inspiring us with his expanse of knowledge both in his field as well as not from his field. This just proves and reiterates the fact that if you are having an idea and want to do something in med-tech then no one is going to stop you rather you will have a huge pool of people supporting you.
In the second half of the first day of Hackathon all the mentors of the 8 projects that were considered to be a part of the hackathon this year gave a presentation describing their project and the goal of the hackathon. The different projects were ACDC (Anterior Chamer Depth to Corneal Thickness ratio Quantifier that uses Van Henrick Grading System to quantify ratio), BRaVO (Branch Retinal Vein Occlusion that quantified the intensity of occlusion in the patient's retina), OIO (Open Indirect Ophthalmoscope, do read more about this awesome project on Google), Creative Games building for Blind, Chat-Bot (that would collect symptomatic information and mediate between patients and doctors), Corneal Topographer (a portable device that would generate corneal topography in the smartphone itself), KAHT (Keratoconous Analysis and Hypothesis Testing that involves working with ocr libraries and machine learning algorithms to extract useful parameters from scans) and last but not the least DESQ (Dry Eyes Syndrome Quantifier).
After all the 8 presentations all the participants had to shortlist the project they liked to work for based on their interest and discuss with the mentors and form a better idea about everything. Talking about me, one thing I was clear was with the domain I wanted to work in and that being Image Processing. Based on that I shortlisted ACDC, DESQ AND BRaVO. I went around talking one on one to all the mentors and started giving priorities to these projects. What I observed was many people like me who were interested in Image Processing were inclined towards ACDC may be because the mentors presented the task quite clearly whereas in my case I was inclined towards DESQ because this was completely a new approach and a new idea which involved working closely with the clinical mentor and getting to understand what exactly and how exactly is dry eyes syndrome caused and developing our own approach over the week. Finally after all the discussions that even extended till the evening tea break I was clear with my priorities being DESQ, then ACDC and then BRaVO. Towards the end of the day when the mentors started reviewing and accepting participants into their team, I was very happy to get into DESQ the one which I also wished for.
My experience with Team DESQ:
We were mentored by Aditya, Rohith, Serena and Dr. Nagaraju (our clinical mentor). Meet the cool team:
Dry eyes is becoming a very common disease nowadays. Basically when your eyes don't get sufficient moisture then you might be suffering from dry eyes. Especially in IT sector where laptop screen is what they gaze at for the whole day these kinds of irritations to the eyes generally happen that would eventually lead to dry eyes. Going a little biological, we have a tear film just above the cornea that consists of three layers i.e. the one closest to the eyes is mucin layer, then the watery aqueous layer and then the oily lipid layer. So every time we blink this tear film gets refreshed. If you find a person blinking more than usual then that is probably because his aqueous layer gets evaporated faster and that is why he needs to blink again to refresh it. Our focus was on lipid layer for this hackathon where under proper illumination of the eyes some kind of interference patterns were formed on the lipid layer and by studying those patterns the irregularities in the lipid layer could be quantified. The mech and tronix team worked closely and designed the evenly illuminated dome by finding the exact beam angles of the leds used and developing the right solid works model for it which was then 3 D printed and all the 33 leds soldered onto it in parallel arrangement. Finally this is how it looked:
The task for the image processing team was to extract the region of interest from the image and then based on the different colors present in the lipid layer interference pattern developing a 3 D equivalent model that helped to visualize the irregularities in the thickness of lipid layer. Because based on some previous research a particular color in the interference pattern correspondes to a particular thickness of lipid layer for example blue color means 180 nm, brown means 130 nm thickness of lipid layer and so on. I was a part of this image processing team and this is my work sample:
The original image:
This shows the irregularities in the lipid layer:
Check out the code here: https://github.com/OmPrakash95/Tearoscope/tree/master/MATLAB
There is more to this project like finding NITBUT- Non Invasive Tear Break Up Time (we just started with this but not completed). Because dry eyes can not be diagnosed with just one test, there are multiple tests to it which will only ensure the severity of dry eyes in any patient. Our ultimate goal is to create a cheap and portable device that would act as a single device for multiple tests and finally give the output as not just detecting dry eyes but also quantifying it. We were happy to achieve our hackathon goals and got our device tested on a real patient who had irregular lipid layer and we were successful enough to obtain the interference patterns when viewed through a slit lamp (it is a device used for focusing a part in the eye) with the evenly illuminated dome that was built. A huge thanks to Dr. Nagaraju for all the support throughout the hackathon, I really got to learn a lot.
My hackathon experience doesn't just end here. One day in between as a break for all of us there was a trip to Tudukurthy village arranged where we got to see the primary and secondary vision centers of LVPEI and got to understand how it functions and helps in providing free services to the villagers. Also one evening a hospital tour was arranged which really got me excited because if you see eyes are just a small organ (but a very important one and also the only exposed part of the brain) but a whole big hospital built just for eyes with different big big dedicated departments for Retina, Cornea, Glaucoma etc, it was indeed a nice experience to see the functioning of different devices used for various diagnosis. The best part here being I was the only one who got a chance to test if I have Glaucoma or not using some kind of sophisticated automatic visual field testing device as a part of demonstation obviously. The test lasted for about 4-5 minutes and thankfully I don't have glaucoma and I have a very normal fovea (Google which part of retina is called fovea and which part is called blind spot) sensitivity of 37Db (maximum allowed is 40Db) :P
The last day was the final presentation day where we showcased all that we did throughout the week. During the closing ceremony we got an opportunity to hear from Dr. Gullapalli Rao (Chair of LVPEI) and he started his talk asking the question why are you all here? To which we all answered that we are here to learn, network, create a social impact and so forth. But the answer that the Doctor expected was that we are here to eradicate blindness and all that we answered was a subset of this. This was again an important moment for me where I realised I am a part of this cause and in the journey to help everyone enjoy the beauty and gift of vision. Though I am a tiny part of it now but still I am proud of it and wish to do something really more in future.
To sum it up, it was a wonderful experience meeting so many like minded people and working with them for a week together and exploring the field of biomedical which I wish to pursue ahead. This definitely was a turning point for me in terms of building my research interests in future. And of course how can I forget to mention the yummy Paradise Hyderabadi Biryani! :P
Here's the DESQ group photo that was taken after the successful testing done of our prototype on the patient:
To know anything more feel free to reach out to me personally and I'll be glad to discuss and share whatever I can with you. Thanks :)
Next day in the morning all the participants, mentors and the clinical mentors assembled in the auditorium on the 6th floor of the hospital. (well the balcony had a nice view of Hyderabad here...)
We first had a mandatory introductory round where I realized I was among a very diverse and highly knowledgeable group of people of which many were Machine learning enthusiasts (well ML and image processing became the buzz word for the hackathon) from different colleges all over India and knew that this was the best place to network and build connections. After that Dr. Anthony Vipin Das took over the stage and welcomed all of us with such energy and shared the story of how Srujana-The Centre for Innovations was born and the journey so far. If you happen to visit LVPEI ever then you would notice that the ground floor just when you enter the campus is given to Srujana, so that is the amount of importance given to Innovations in Health-Care. A glimpse of Srujana:
Coming back to Dr. Vipin, I am glad that I met him because he is such an amazing doctor, researcher, innovator, TED speaker and I am totally amazed at his research and all his works. Have a look at this to know it for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzBTBAoAFE0&t=67s
It was a pleasure to hear Dr. Pravin (from Tej Kohli Cornea Institute), Dr. Nandini, Dr. Ashutosh, Dr. Jagdish and Dr. Subhadra (Specialist in preventing blindness among premature babies) speak about their work and constantly encouraging us to take up problems in eye-care and build effective solutions towards it. Following them the 4 team lead technologists of Srujana, Sankalp, Koteshwar, Sandeep and Ashish spoke about their totally commendable work and their projects at Srujana. By now you all might have got an idea that this was not merely a hackathon but also a place where we got introduced to great personalities who guided us totally and were very open to all our questions, like we got to hear Dr. Ramesh Raskar (Head of Camera Culture Group at MIT Media Labs), Prof Ramesh Loganathan (IIIT Hyderabad), Prashant Gupta (from Microsoft) and Mr. Annamalai (from CYIENT) speak. We had Dr. Sangwan (Director of Srujana) talking to us the second day and who was by our side for the rest of the week constantly motivating us and inspiring us with his expanse of knowledge both in his field as well as not from his field. This just proves and reiterates the fact that if you are having an idea and want to do something in med-tech then no one is going to stop you rather you will have a huge pool of people supporting you.
In the second half of the first day of Hackathon all the mentors of the 8 projects that were considered to be a part of the hackathon this year gave a presentation describing their project and the goal of the hackathon. The different projects were ACDC (Anterior Chamer Depth to Corneal Thickness ratio Quantifier that uses Van Henrick Grading System to quantify ratio), BRaVO (Branch Retinal Vein Occlusion that quantified the intensity of occlusion in the patient's retina), OIO (Open Indirect Ophthalmoscope, do read more about this awesome project on Google), Creative Games building for Blind, Chat-Bot (that would collect symptomatic information and mediate between patients and doctors), Corneal Topographer (a portable device that would generate corneal topography in the smartphone itself), KAHT (Keratoconous Analysis and Hypothesis Testing that involves working with ocr libraries and machine learning algorithms to extract useful parameters from scans) and last but not the least DESQ (Dry Eyes Syndrome Quantifier).
After all the 8 presentations all the participants had to shortlist the project they liked to work for based on their interest and discuss with the mentors and form a better idea about everything. Talking about me, one thing I was clear was with the domain I wanted to work in and that being Image Processing. Based on that I shortlisted ACDC, DESQ AND BRaVO. I went around talking one on one to all the mentors and started giving priorities to these projects. What I observed was many people like me who were interested in Image Processing were inclined towards ACDC may be because the mentors presented the task quite clearly whereas in my case I was inclined towards DESQ because this was completely a new approach and a new idea which involved working closely with the clinical mentor and getting to understand what exactly and how exactly is dry eyes syndrome caused and developing our own approach over the week. Finally after all the discussions that even extended till the evening tea break I was clear with my priorities being DESQ, then ACDC and then BRaVO. Towards the end of the day when the mentors started reviewing and accepting participants into their team, I was very happy to get into DESQ the one which I also wished for.
My experience with Team DESQ:
We were mentored by Aditya, Rohith, Serena and Dr. Nagaraju (our clinical mentor). Meet the cool team:
Dry eyes is becoming a very common disease nowadays. Basically when your eyes don't get sufficient moisture then you might be suffering from dry eyes. Especially in IT sector where laptop screen is what they gaze at for the whole day these kinds of irritations to the eyes generally happen that would eventually lead to dry eyes. Going a little biological, we have a tear film just above the cornea that consists of three layers i.e. the one closest to the eyes is mucin layer, then the watery aqueous layer and then the oily lipid layer. So every time we blink this tear film gets refreshed. If you find a person blinking more than usual then that is probably because his aqueous layer gets evaporated faster and that is why he needs to blink again to refresh it. Our focus was on lipid layer for this hackathon where under proper illumination of the eyes some kind of interference patterns were formed on the lipid layer and by studying those patterns the irregularities in the lipid layer could be quantified. The mech and tronix team worked closely and designed the evenly illuminated dome by finding the exact beam angles of the leds used and developing the right solid works model for it which was then 3 D printed and all the 33 leds soldered onto it in parallel arrangement. Finally this is how it looked:
The task for the image processing team was to extract the region of interest from the image and then based on the different colors present in the lipid layer interference pattern developing a 3 D equivalent model that helped to visualize the irregularities in the thickness of lipid layer. Because based on some previous research a particular color in the interference pattern correspondes to a particular thickness of lipid layer for example blue color means 180 nm, brown means 130 nm thickness of lipid layer and so on. I was a part of this image processing team and this is my work sample:
The original image:
This shows the irregularities in the lipid layer:
There is more to this project like finding NITBUT- Non Invasive Tear Break Up Time (we just started with this but not completed). Because dry eyes can not be diagnosed with just one test, there are multiple tests to it which will only ensure the severity of dry eyes in any patient. Our ultimate goal is to create a cheap and portable device that would act as a single device for multiple tests and finally give the output as not just detecting dry eyes but also quantifying it. We were happy to achieve our hackathon goals and got our device tested on a real patient who had irregular lipid layer and we were successful enough to obtain the interference patterns when viewed through a slit lamp (it is a device used for focusing a part in the eye) with the evenly illuminated dome that was built. A huge thanks to Dr. Nagaraju for all the support throughout the hackathon, I really got to learn a lot.
My hackathon experience doesn't just end here. One day in between as a break for all of us there was a trip to Tudukurthy village arranged where we got to see the primary and secondary vision centers of LVPEI and got to understand how it functions and helps in providing free services to the villagers. Also one evening a hospital tour was arranged which really got me excited because if you see eyes are just a small organ (but a very important one and also the only exposed part of the brain) but a whole big hospital built just for eyes with different big big dedicated departments for Retina, Cornea, Glaucoma etc, it was indeed a nice experience to see the functioning of different devices used for various diagnosis. The best part here being I was the only one who got a chance to test if I have Glaucoma or not using some kind of sophisticated automatic visual field testing device as a part of demonstation obviously. The test lasted for about 4-5 minutes and thankfully I don't have glaucoma and I have a very normal fovea (Google which part of retina is called fovea and which part is called blind spot) sensitivity of 37Db (maximum allowed is 40Db) :P
The last day was the final presentation day where we showcased all that we did throughout the week. During the closing ceremony we got an opportunity to hear from Dr. Gullapalli Rao (Chair of LVPEI) and he started his talk asking the question why are you all here? To which we all answered that we are here to learn, network, create a social impact and so forth. But the answer that the Doctor expected was that we are here to eradicate blindness and all that we answered was a subset of this. This was again an important moment for me where I realised I am a part of this cause and in the journey to help everyone enjoy the beauty and gift of vision. Though I am a tiny part of it now but still I am proud of it and wish to do something really more in future.
To sum it up, it was a wonderful experience meeting so many like minded people and working with them for a week together and exploring the field of biomedical which I wish to pursue ahead. This definitely was a turning point for me in terms of building my research interests in future. And of course how can I forget to mention the yummy Paradise Hyderabadi Biryani! :P
Here's the DESQ group photo that was taken after the successful testing done of our prototype on the patient:
To know anything more feel free to reach out to me personally and I'll be glad to discuss and share whatever I can with you. Thanks :)
ReplyDeleteHi Nice Post,For More Updates
Neuro Surgeon in Hyderabad