Nicola Billings
Currently, I am a first year M.Sc. student in the Veterinary AI lab at the University of Guelph. Throughout my first year of my M.Sc. I was awarded the December 6th Memorial Graduate Scholarship which was awarded to a female student in graduate studies with a high academic standing and involvement in the school of engineering. I work under the guidance of Dr. Ryan Appleby, Dr. Eran Ukwatta, and Dr. Amin Komeili. I graduated from the Biomedical Engineering program at the University of Guelph in 2022. My area of research is on improving radiation therapy planning by developing MRI-based radiation treatment plans without the use of CT through deep learning. The results of this study could significantly improve the radiation therapy treatment planning process by reducing imaging costs, imaging time, and preventing ionizing radiation exposure.
Nicole Norena
Nicole Norena graduated from the University of Guelph in 2021 with a Bachelor of Science in Animal Biology and a minor in Neuroscience. During her undergraduate degree, Nicole was a student researcher in fields including, but not limited to, animal welfare, animal nutrition, animal behaviour, and pathobiology. Nicole has also had a profound interest in pursuing research that focuses on improving animal health through advances in clinical practice. As a result, Nicole is now a master’s student studying diagnostic imaging in the Department of Clinical Studies under the supervision of Dr. Ryan Appleby and Dr. Amin Komeili. Her research project is focused on investigating and proposing a novel active learning model for the segmentation of canine thoracic radiographs. The veterinary AI lab intends to use the results of this research to develop an artificial intelligence model that can automatically segment structures and/or pathologies on canine and feline radiographs. Overall, Nicole believes that AI technologies will provide veterinarians and radiologists with powerful tools to improve patient care in the future.
Peyman Tahghighi
Peyman Tahghighi is a second-year Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering at the University of Guelph with a research focus on applications of artificial intelligence in veterinary radiology. His research interests involve machine learning, deep neural networks and image processing. He received his BSc. in computer science from Kharazmi University, Iran,
in 2016 and his MSc in computer engineering at the University of Tehran, Iran, in 2021.