In the second year of my PhD, I took one of my favorite classes in graduate school – Medical Imaging Systems. In the class I learned about the popular imaging modalities, such as CT, MRI and ultrasound, and the physics principles behind them. The pleasure of using my knowledge in theoretical physics in a real-world setting to help people was so immense that I finally decided to switch my research area from theoretical physics to medical physics.
During the course, we were assigned a task to write a program to reconstruct ultrasound images from clinically obtained raw data. After finishing the reconstruction code, I created another program to simulate the transducers and the acquisition of the synthetic raw data to pair with the reconstruction. Using this two-piece simulator, I was able to play with the reconstruction of objects of any shape and of any physical properties. One of the objects I created is the calligraphic writing of my family name in Chinese (as shown in the picture). By changing the imaging parameters I was able to produce images with different levels of noise and resolution.
I had great fun in this project, which motivated me to dedicate myself to the field of medical imaging.