Research and Projects

Machine Learning for Lung Disease

Lung diseases, are among the most common medical conditions in the world. According to the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), the mortality rate from chronic respiratory diseases has risen by almost 30% between 1980 and 2014 in the United States, and that data reflect significant differences in death rates across counties and regions. Diagnosis and prognosis of lung diseases early-on plays a key role in preventing long-term damages to the lung and health of patients. Thanks to the advances in machine learning and availability of X-rays and computerized tomography (CT) scans, we can use these methods for diagnosis and prognosis of lung disease. It is also of great importance to use machine learning for extracting the underlying patterns in the data, instead of just performing a classification task. This can help radiologists to understand the dynamics of the disease better and possibly study the effect of different treatments. In this project, I am working on interpretable machine learning models for diagnosis, prognosis, and understanding of lung diseases.

Machine Learning for Nanophotonics

Photonic nanostructures have been of great recent interest due to their unique capabilities to manipulate the properties of electromagnetic (EM) waves beyond what conventional bulk materials can do. Combined with the advances in nanofabrication technologies, these nanostructures have been used to demonstrate devices with enormous potential for groundbreaking technologies such as computing, imaging, energy harvesting, and electronics to name a few. Designing these structures, however, is a very challenging task which traditionally has been done using brute-force methods. These methods needs lots of computation power and do not provide any information about the underlying patterns in the data. In this project, I am working on developing machine learning models for inverse design and understanding the underlying physics of light matter interaction in nanophotonic structures.