I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Surgical Planning Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. I graduated in 2007 from Stanford University's Electrical Engineering Department. My advisor was Sandy Napel. That year I was also nominated for the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Research Trainee Prize.

My research interests include medical image analysis, shape understanding, and computer vision. My thesis work aimed to provide radiologists with better visualizations of the colon. The colon looks a lot like a corrugated tube.  Its inner surface is lined with folds that make for difficult navigation and also contribute to false positives in the case of computer aided detection of colonic polyps. Specifically, we tried to create a visualization of the colon that was free from folds and only displayed polyps. In order to achieve this, we adopted a physics-based approach.  Starting from CT images of the colon, we created triangle meshes that were stretched out in such a way as to flatten the folds and leave the polyps behind. We used PhysBAM to perform the finite element computations.

E-mail: padma@bwh.harvard.edu