URSP Mohamed Lahlou Models Behavior of Skeletal Muscle Movement using Ultra Sound Data In MATlab

I got interested in this project while looking for a way to get involved in medical imaging devices and prosthetics. I have always been interested in learning and working on prosthetic devices because they take all our understanding about the human body and electronics and combine it into something that can help people perform everyday tasks, which they may not be able to do. I learned about Dr. Sikdar’s project through a classmate who had been working with him last semester and I enjoyed the idea of creating a new approach to an existing method. I’ve heard about EMG being used for prosthetic device control, but the idea of using ultra sound imaging being a more inexpensive method that could help simplify prosthetic use seemed almost unbelievable. So I talked to Dr. Sikdar about his project and he helped find a way for me to be a part of his team.

This lab experience is invaluable to my future of working on my own prosthetic development. The lab provides many learning opportunities in programming and design, while learning how to run trial after trial to test the devices and coding. This is extremely valuable to me because I am learning so much about the factors and limitations that need to be considered for making a prosthetic which are extremely important with making a marketable device. I have also picked up lab etiquette, learning how a scholar is to act in a lab. This experience has taught me to pace myself with research and progress, learning that you can’t figure everything out as soon as you have a problem and that it takes time to get to where you want to be in the project and I need to be patience.

On a weekly basis, I have meetings with Dr. Sikdar and everyone else who is working on their aspect of the project, and we present our progress update or what our portion of our project has finished or new methods we are looking at. Then I also do a lot of matlab coding and editing, trying to figure out ways to improve the code written for the GUI and functions. This week I discovered an error in the matlab code that might significantly improve the run time of the device, getting rid of some of the delay we have been having in the real time interface. Also, I discovered a possible better method of calculating correlation between aggregated images, which can give us a better accuracy in our real time prosthetic trial runs.