The Técnico alumna Beatriz Filipe (Biomedical Engineering) won the “ULisboa – redeSAÚDE Award” in the “Best MSc Work in Applied Research” category, for her work titled “Using multi-input deep learning networks in medical images for the automatic detection of pathological states”.
“I’m very happy and proud of my work and my achievements”, says Beatriz Filipe. “This is the culmination of 5 years of work and winning this award makes me feel really happy”, stresses the alumna.
The award-winning work was supervised by professor Rita Nunes (Department of Bioengineering – DBE) and professor Fabio Scarpa (University of Padua). The work used multi-input deep learning networks in corneal and retinal medical images, for the automatic detection of pathological states in diabetic neuropathy and diabetic retinopathy, respectively. Different neural networks such as LeNet-5, AlexNet, GoogLeNet and ResNet were tested, as well as optimizers (mini-batch SGD, RMSprop, Adam) with different learning rates (0.01, 0.001, 0.0001). All these combinations were applied only on corneal images and the one that showed the best performance was selected to be tested on retinal images.
“This approach to neural networks, with multiple inputs, has achieved very good results and can be promising for diagnoses with more than one image and/or different types of data”, the alumna points out.
Beatriz Filipe believes that the topic of her work may have been crucial to her success: “This topic has gained importance recently. Its application to the healthcare sector has great advantages and it is something that is still emerging”.
The Técnico alumna became aware of the “ULisboa – redeSAÚDE Awards” when she was about to finish her MSc thesis. “I thought it was a good opportunity to show my work and meet people in the healthcare technology sector”, she recalls.
Beatriz Filipe is preparing herself to get into the job market as she is about to join the NTT DATA’s healthcare and life sciences team. “Although I don’t know very well what sort of projects awaits me, I want to continue developing healthcare machine learning projects”, she shares.
On 30th November 2021, the PhD alumnus Rui Coelho, was one of the winners of the “ULisboa – redeSAÚDE Awards”, in the “Best PhD Work in Applied Research” category.
The “ULisboa – redeSAÚDE Awards” were created in 2021 and aim to encourage study and research in the field of health, and to recognise the best Masters and Doctoral works carried out at Universidade de Lisboa in this field.
