Most of our undergraduate Biomedical Engineering concentrators engage in laboratory research across campus, and greater than 50% of the Class of 2018 completed an honors research thesis.  One of these students, Adil Akif ’18 recently turned his honors thesis research into a first-authored publication entitled, Doppler OCT clutter rejection using variance minimization and offset extrapolation.

Akif joined Assistant Professor Jonghwan Lee’s lab in January 2017.  The Lee lab is focused on the development of optical technologies for imaging of tissue structures and dynamics, and Akif’s project focused on improving the accuracy of Doppler optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging of blood flow in the brain. Dr. Lee suggested Doppler OCT as a tool to improve the accuracy of another OCT technology in development in the lab, but in reviewing the literature, Akif pointed out what he thought was a flaw in the currently used analysis methods. Lee says, “When he raised this issue for the first time, honestly I had my doubts about it because the analysis method has been widely used for over a decade.” Several weeks later, Akif produced pilot numerical simulation results that supported his hypothesis. With Lee’s support, Akif took his undergraduate research in this new direction.

“Adil came up with a brilliant idea to address the problem.”  In less than a year, he devised and implemented a novel algorithm in MATLAB.  He first-tested a large-scale synthesized set of OCT blood flow data and then applied his algorithm to real blood flow data from OCT of the brains of research animals. Akif and Lee, along with their co-authors undergraduate student Konrad Walek ’18 and research technician Collin Polucha, published their findings in Biomedical Optics Express. Akif is continuing to develop his research skills as a PhD student at Yale University.