Team

Principal Investigator

Dr. Fiona Kolbinger, MD

Fiona is a physician by training and joined Purdue University's Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as a Research Assistant Professor in 2023. She holds secondary affiliations with the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE) at Purdue University, the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science at Indiana University, and the Department of Visceral, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery at the University Hospital Dresden, Germany. Fiona completed her doctorate at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany in 2019 and has since conducted translational research at the intersection of surgery and data science. Her works aim to develop computational tools for personalized treatment in surgery and interventional medicine and to evaluate the clinical value of these tools in early-phase clinical trials. Fiona's publications are listed on Google Scholar and Pubmed.

Researchers

Muhammad Ibtsaam Qadir, BE

Ibtsaam joined the team in May 2024 as a graduate researcher in the field of Biomedical Engineering. He completed his undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at the National University of Science and Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan in 2023. His research focuses on deep learning-based analysis of medical imaging and multimodal clinical data for the prediction of disease trajectories in patients with pancreatic disease.

Yi Yang, MSc

Yi joined the team in August 2024 as a graduate researcher in the field of Biomedical Engineering, supported by a CIGP Lynn Fellowship. Following his undergraduate studies in Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University, he graduated from Columbia University with a master's degree in Bioinformatics and Machine Learning in 2023. His research interests include deep learning-based analysis of various medical imaging modalities including ultrasound, radiological, and histopathological imaging. Yi's research aims to make the compilation of large-scale clinical datasets more efficient and to connect information from various data types for decision support in patients with cancer and autoimmune disease.

Zheyuan Zhang, MSc

Zheyuan joined the lab in August 2024 as a graduate researcher in Biomedical Engineering. He holds a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University in Haining, China and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed his master's degree at Johns Hopkins University in 2024. Building on his experience in surgical image analysis, his research focuses on surgical scene understanding and intraoperative surgical decision support as well as multicentric collaboration in the field of Surgical Data Science.

Atin Dewan

Atin is an undergraduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering who joined the team in 2024. He is interested in deep learning-based surgical video analysis for educational feedback and intraoperative decision support.

Farren Martinus

Farren is part of the team since 2024. He is a Biomedical Engineering undergraduate student with an interest in electrical engineering and medical decision support software development. His research focuses on the analysis of laparoscopic imaging data.

Madison Loiselle

Maddie studies Biomedical Engineering with a Computer Science minor and joined the team in 2024. She works on veterinary imaging data and investigates ways to predict clinically actionable endpoints histopathological and radiological routine imaging.

Natasha Gundapanemi

Natasha studies Electrical and Computer Engineering and joined the lab in August 2024. She supports our team's medical image segmentation pipeline.

Nathan Pairitz

Nate is a medical student at Indiana University West Lafayette with a keen interest in anatomy and medical education. His research focuses on the practical integration of large language models into medical curricula.

Saloni Jajoo

Saloni is a Data Science student at Purdue University with a minor in Computer Science. Building on years of experience in data analysis and visualization, she aims to identify clinically relevant disease patterns from large clinical datasets in the fields of interventional cardiology and cardiac surgery. In addition, she contributes to ongoing qualitative research on the clinical translation of intraoperative surgical decision support systems. Saloni joined the team in 2024.

Associate Lab Members

Dr. Matthias Carstens, MD

Matthias joined the lab in 2020 as a medical doctoral student and defended his thesis in 2024 (magna cum laude). He is now a surgeon scientist at the Technical University Dresden, Germany. His research focuses on the compilation and analysis of large-scale datasets of laparoscopic imaging for intraoperative decision support. Matthias is specifically interested in improving the efficiency and value of expert annotations. In addition, he is interested in human-AI interaction and investigates the usability of intraoperative surgical decision support systems. Find Matthias on Pubmed.

Kevin Pfeiffer

Kevin is a medical doctoral student at the Technical University Dresden and is co-advised by Prof. Jakob Kather at the Technical University Dresden. Building on years of programming experience, Kevin focuses on deep learning-based analysis of histopathological imaging from patients with pancreatic tumors to identify novel biomarkers. Moreover, he is interested in practical implementation of decentralized AI methods such as Swarm Learning.

Hanna Schmeiser

Hanna joined the team as a medical doctoral student in 2022. Her doctoral research focuses on the prediction of postoperative pancreatic fistula after distal pancreatectomy based on multimodal preoperative and intraoperative data. Hanna is co-advised by Prof. Marius Distler at the Technical University Dresden.

Alumni

Dr. Sophie-Caroline Schwarzkopf, BSc, MD was a medical doctoral student and a clinician scientist in our group from 2021-2024. She conducted research on educational serious gaming applications in the context of surgical patient care and postoperative complications. Sophie defended her doctoral thesis in 2023 (summa cum laude). Her published works are listed on Pubmed.

Thomas Nielen was a medical doctoral student in our group from 2020-2022 and conducted research on functional outcomes after rectal cancer surgery. Find Thomas on Pubmed.

Dr. Franziska Rinner, MD was part of the lab as a medical doctoral student from 2020-2022 and conducted research on intraoperative surgical decision support. She defended her thesis at the Technical University Dresden in 2024 (summa cum laude). Find Fanny’s published works on Pubmed.