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 a secondary affiliation with 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
Jinge Ma
Jinge joined Purdue University in August 2023 as a PhD student and is co-advised by Prof. Fengqing Maggie Zhu at the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Jinge is working on laparoscopic image analysis for adaptive intraoperative surgical decision support.
Muhammad Ibtsaam Qadir
Ibtsaam will join the TIPS Lab in 2024 as a PhD student in 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.
Farren Martinus
Farren joined the team in 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.
Henry Nguyen
Henry is an aspiring Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering student who joined the TIPS Lab in 2024. Having worked with X-ray imaging of turbines before joining our team, he now primarily investigates medical imaging data, focusing on histopathological data from various species.
Madison Loiselle
Maddie studies Biomedical Engineering with a Computer Science minor and joined the team in 2024. She works on veterinary histopathology data and investigates ways to predict clinically actionable endpoints from routine imaging.
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. Saloni joined the team in 2024.
Stephanie Close
Steph studies Electrical and Computer Engineering and joined the TIPS Lab in 2024. Building on years of programming experience, her research focuses on deep learning-based analysis of radiological imaging data.
Yash Agnihotri
Yash joined the team in 2024. He is an Electrical and Computer Engineering student interested in computational image analysis and medical education. His research aims to improve surgical skill analysis based on automated analysis of video data.
Associate Lab Members
Dr. Sophie-Caroline Schwarzkopf, BSc, MD
Sophie is a clinician scientist in the field of obstetrics and gynecology with a strong interest in medical education and training. She joined the lab in 2021. Sophie holds a bachelor's degree in Health Economics and graduated from medical school in 2022. Her research focuses on serious gaming in medical education in the context of surgical complications as well as laparoscopic skill acquisition and abdominal sonography. Sophie's published research is listed on Pubmed.
Matthias Carstens
Matthias joined the lab in 2020. He is a medical doctoral student at the Technical University Dresden, Germany, and is co-advised by Prof. Marius Distler. His research focuses on the compilation and analysis of unique 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.
Mark Enrik Geissler
Enrik is a medical student with diverse research experience in both wet lab settings and computational labs. He is interested in leveraging computational methods for the analysis of routine imaging in laparoscopic surgery and foregut endoscopy.
Kevin Pfeiffer
Kevin is a medical doctoral student at the Technical University Dresden and is co-advised by Prof. Jakob Kather. 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
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.
Franziska Rinner was part of the lab as a medical doctoral student from 2020-2022 and conducted research on intraoperative surgical decision support. Find Fanny’s published works on Pubmed.