03.12.2023

Hello, nice to meet you all!

Allow me to introduce myself—my name is Melise Rocha, a passionate individual on a quest for knowledge and impact in the realms of Health Informatics and Neuroscience. As a current bachelor student in Health Informatics, my academic pursuits delve into the intricate intersection of health and technology. However, my aspirations reach beyond the classroom, as I aspire to contribute meaningfully to the field of neuroscience.

Early Inspiration

My journey as a neuroscientist started at a very early age, my father has always had serious migraine problems and during the nights at the hospital with him and my mom, I often found myself contemplating ways in which I could alleviate the suffering of individuals battling with brain diseases. This early exposure ignited a passion to make a tangible difference in the lives of those affected and their families. At the age of 15, I joined a technical degree in Biomedical Equipment, realizing how much technology can help in accelerating research results and improving diagnosis accuracy.

Parkinson’s Disease Project

In the middle of my first year in the technical degree, my grandfather’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease exposed me to the challenges within the Brazilian Healthcare System. The waiting time for medical appointments and exams was between 3 and 6 months, and we could do nothing but wait. Then, I again started to wonder how more effective and fast solutions need to be designed. This was when I started a research project that later was called “Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis Using Artificial Intelligence”. During almost two years I and a classmate developed a small application that analyses spiral images and labels them as being made by someone with Parkinson’s or Health, reaching 85% accuracy. We used Histogram of Oriented Gradients for feature extraction and Random FOrest for image classification. This project allowed me to visit 4 Brazilian federal states presenting it.

The main inspiration for this project

I have decided to study and research about Alzheimer’s Disease. It is very usual to use MRI images to aid in the diagnosis of this disease. However, many of MRI images have a lot of noises and they do not follow a pattern. Thus it is difficult to use them in projects for Artificial Intelligence where data needs to follow a pattern.

Then, I will use this blog to document my progress in the creation of an automation project to improve quality of MRI images.

See you next week :)