By Karen Flores, staff writer
Several Manhattan College students are researching MRI effectiveness and efficiency under Angel Pineda, Ph.D., professor of mathematics, and Rehan Mehta, a senior economics and mathematics double major, presenting their findings at various conferences.
According to manhattan.edu, the project is being funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), which granted Pineda a three-year $434,000 grant as a renewal of his current NIH grant.
Pineda explained that the goal of this project is to make the MRI machines faster while keeping the results at the same rate of accuracy.
“Our goal is to make MRI faster while still allowing the radiologist to see the same pathology, that way they can make it faster and keep it just as clinically accurate,” Pineda said. “If you’re a researcher, you want to find the kinds of research that other people aren’t doing because that means that you can contribute something. The reason why we’re working in MRI is because not many people are doing the kind of work that we do for MRI.”
Aside from presenting in the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference in San Diego, Mehta has presented the research at conferences in Wisconsin and San Francisco.
“First we developed these kinds of models, graphs and visualizations and then all that work culminated into collating the results into a paper, which we submitted as an abstract to the SPIE medical imaging conference in San Diego,” Mehta said. “We got our paper accepted as a talk and Dr. Pineda gave me the gracious opportunity to present a talk and I am very grateful for that.”
Mehta was one of a few undergraduate students presenting at the conference.
“The thing that makes his presentation in San Diego amazing is that he was presenting along with Ph.D. students, postdocs and faculty,” Pineda said. “He was one of a few undergraduates at the conference.”
Mehta first began researching with Pineda in 2022 during which he worked alongside Tetsuya Kawakita, an MC alum currently pursuing a master’s degree in chemical engineering at Columbia University.
“During 2022, my previous colleague Tetsuya Kawakita and I worked on developing human observer models for undersampled MRI by finding the optimal level of frequencies needed to understand the kinds of models that can automate tumor detection using two forced choice tasks and a force localization task,” Mehta said. “I took the role of continuing the programming of these kinds of models under the mentorship of Dr. Pineda.”
Kawakita worked on making a model for the two alternative forced-choice tasks and said that, like any other research, there was some trial and error.
“Back when I was an MC undergrad, I made the new model as well as tried it out to different noise models to see whether the noise within an image affects the noise within the human mind,” Kawakita explained. “But that seemed inconclusive and we just continued to look for new possibilities. Sometimes it can be frustrating, but nothing beats the feeling of getting some good results or some kind of answer after many weeks of difficulties.”
Aurora Shahu, a junior computer science major, is one of the students currently working on the research alongside Mehta. She explained how the research involves interdisciplinary work.
“Rehan is using MATLAB and me and Aliaa [Eldakhakhny], the other student researcher, are using Python,” Shahu said. “We’re doing the same thing but we’re incorporating it with computer science through code while Rehan is using MATLAB and doing the procedures through linear regressions, statistics and other mathematical tools.”
Shahu said that research helps in applying skills she learned in the classroom to try and provide ways to advance current knowledge in different fields.
“We learned the basics in my computer science classes, and I’m able to strategize and learn how to solve problems from looking at different points of view through this research,” Shahu said. “The world is evolving and research is a great opportunity to find and learn something new through trial and error. I think it is great that computer science can be integrated in the medical field. So I’m hoping that it goes well and see how far we can go with it.”
Pineda encourages students to look into research opportunities with faculty members.
“I think that students getting involved in research with faculty is a fantastic and wonderful experience,” Pineda said. “I would encourage students to approach faculty, share their interests should they have any in mind and see if they would be interested in doing research with them. The experiences and knowledge gained is very valuable.”