Avani Ahuja is a junior at Georgetown Day High School and has conducted research in the intersections of robotics and medicine for the past two years. Inspired by a desire to help the healthcare workers that have sacrificed their lives throughout the pandemic, she developed segmentation algorithms for autonomous ultrasound scans of lungs in COVID-19 patients to minimize contact between healthcare staff and sick patients during a preliminary diagnostic scan.
She is working as a Neilom Intern with Dr. Axel Krieger at Johns Hopkins University on a pilot version of an autonomous robotic ultrasound system using her work. Her work in segmentation of lung images was important for the team’s work on autonomous robotic ultrasound for COVID-19, and resulted in a co-authored journal paper submission in the Frontiers in AI journal. Avani also independently researched a noise reduction technique for machine learning approaches that was submitted for publication to a Bioinformatics journal.
As a passionate STEM student, she has also led various initiatives to empower underrepresented groups to pursue careers in science.