Jacob Chandran

IM 6, 12 AP
5/15/17
Project Proposal
1. What specific area(s) within the field will be investigated, researched and/or studied?

The researcher will be studying the use of autoencoders for image classification and
disease recognition. He will also be compressing image data to create a statistic center of mass
for healthy patients and be able to recognize unhealthy patients by noting the deviation from that
statistic center of mass. Afterwards, this research will be applied to diagnosing and recognizing
breast cancer in its incipient stages

2. How will knowledge or ability in the field be acquired, developed and demonstrated
through the year?
The researcher will make many presentations about autoencoders, the code involved in
its creation, and future applications of this technology. Through following tutorials and doing code
review sessions, the researcher will test the effectiveness of his code in solving the problems of
early detection in multiple diseases. Through reading papers of current work being done on
disease detection, the researcher will find the best methods being used to optimize autoencoders.

3. What will be the outcome of the internship?

The outcome of this internship will be an increased knowledge in the application of

computer science in the medical field, and I will learn how to create my own datasets to be
processed. Up to now, the researcher has only been able to use preprocessed datasets, which
has limited the areas that could be studied with neural networks. Now that custom datasets can
be created, there is are many more possibilities for research

4. What real problem will be solved? What question will be researched?

The researcher will use autoencoders to detect and diagnose Age Related Macular
Degeneration. In addition, this technology will be used to locate and diagnose cysts of cancer in
tissue.

5. What is the intended audience for the project? To whom will the outcome be
communicated?

The intended audience for the project is the Research and Exploratory Development team at JHU
APL.

6. Will the audience be local, state or national?

The audience will be local and national.

7. How will the outcome be communicated to or performed for selected audience? What
will the outlet vehicle?

The outcome of the research will be published in internal research reports as well as in computer
vision journals.

8. What resources will be required for the project?

The project will require MATLAB software, python software, and image databases.
 Jacob Chandran
IM 6, 12 AP
5/15/17
Project Proposal

9. What are the special considerations of the project? (cost, materials, equipment,
transportation, special permission, printing/distribution)

Need to have database access approved to get medical images

Permission to present and display data
Permission to work on a personal computer
Transportation to and from APL