The talented group of interns participating in the sixth year of the Foundation’s summer internship program included four college students who worked on projects ranging from focused ultrasound patient registries to the use of 3D-printed lenses for transcranial FUS. They were recently able to showcase their projects during a lunch time presentation to Leigh Middleditch (pictured right, with three of the four interns), who is on the Board of the Claude Moore Charitable Foundation, the generous funder of this summer program.
“This summer’s interns made valuable contributions to FUSF internal efforts on treatment planning and the adoption of affordable focused ultrasound technologies, in addition to making headway toward the development of a standards document that seeks to compare commercially-available FUS systems across a unified set of equipment specifications,” said the Foundation’s Director of Extramural Research, Matt Eames, PhD.
Below is a brief summary about each of our summer interns and their work at the Foundation.
Lindsey Abramson – Rising senior at the College of New Jersey
Summer Project: Implementing OpenGL-OpenCL Interoperability in the Kranion® System
Lindsey worked on making the Kranion® software application compatible with Mac operating systems. This involved creating shared memory so that OpenGL and OpenCL could interoperate on the texture data created from the CT and MR files obtained from patients.
Derek Fang – 
Rising sophomore at the College of William and Mary
Summer Project: The Use of 3D Printed Lenses in Transcranial Focused Ultrasound
Derek’s project involved 3D-printed transducer lenses to test the material’s ability to alter the speed of sound and focused ultrasound waves. This research was the first step in the potential merging of 3D printing and focused ultrasound, which could change how the technology is developed.
Sarah Hunter-Chang – Rising senior at Emory University
Kassandra Tulenko – Rising fourth year at the University of Virginia
Joint Summer Project: Patient Registry: Systems Catalogue and Expected Parameter Value Ranges
Sarah and Kassie’s work at the Foundation involved creating a focused ultrasound systems catalogue and compiling expected parameter ranges for a patient registry that will go in the National Cancer Institute Data Dictionary. This catalog will accelerate the process of FDA approval in FUS research.
