Summer Research, Convergent Institute for Cancer, USC (cell-matching algorithms & neural network pipeline for CTC detection/phenotyping)
Used fluorescence imaging intensity measurements to support circulating tumor cell detection and phenotyping across a large set of patient blood slides. The work involved building on a two-stage neural network pipeline to analyze how imaging intensity influences model outputs for clinical liquid biopsy optimization. This required preparing and aligning patient slide data for downstream model training and evaluation. • Worked across 103 patient blood slides. • Extended a two-stage neural network pipeline for detection/phenotyping. • Analyzed fluorescence imaging intensity effects on model performance. • Interpreted results in the context of clinical liquid biopsy use cases.