My name is Alexandra and I'm a PhD student in the Helmholtz Information and Data Science School for Health.
So, I'm working both at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the
German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) bringing both together data science and health science.
Imagine, someone is diagnosed with cancer. Then there will be a CT scan
made and I brought you an example of a lung CT. You see three different orientations and
the black parts here is the lung which is easier to identify than other parts.
Now, an expert has to identify where the cancer is and where organs at risk are located.
This is a very time consuming task if done manually and can delay the treatment onset. So,
I'd like to have a computer program that can assist experts with this task. This
is usually done with an artificial neural network and you can see my network here.
This looks like a text document but can do a whole lot and it does already segment the tumor volumes.
Unfortunately, not with a precision that is applicable in clinics. So,
I will tune all the parameters and there's a whole lot of them
to figure out the best settings. Actually, it can help doctors.
I like a lot of different things about my job. Mainly my own project of course.
I like the programming parts, I do like the literature research,
I do curate my own data and also supervise a Hiwi (student assistant) and a Master's student.
There are also some side projects I like and this is for example the website I was
programming with some group members. Also, I'm writing a manuscript for school teachers,
also organizing retreats and cooperations. Then there are also some soft skill courses I can
participate in or I do some science communication days like "Girls Day" or "Science Week" at KIT.
One of my greatest challenges that my data labels show great variability.
You can see two examples that I've drawn here.
They are very diverse. So, a neural network
can recognize patterns but if there's no pattern within the data
my neural network can actually not learn and I need to overcome that challenge. My second
challenge is that training times over neural networks take several days. So, I need to wait.