Thank you to everyone who participated in the Mystery Lab Contest this week - submitters and guessers alike. The winning image is from Day 1!Congratulations to Nicole, who describes her work as follows:
"My general field is engineering or biomedical engineering. This image is from an intermediate step in a computer vision project aimed at better detection of breast cancer in mammograms. The original image is an x-ray of the breast, or mammogram, and through automated image analysis my goal is to determine if the normal structure of the breast tissue has been disrupted by abnormal growth, for example cancer.
Radiologists train for years to be able to detect abnormalities in mammograms with their natural equipment, i.e. their eyes and their brain. The goal of my project, and projects similar to mine, are to teach computers to "see" images at least as well as a human can, and perhaps to add to human abilities with additional mathematical tricks that computers can use and are not easy for humans to do."
Nicole is currently a PhD working on her MD in Chicago. She'll be receiving her copy of Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future soon and we look forward to hearing more about her research and career. We already know she's a good communicator, because she got the message out and received 43 comments for a total of 9,847 points!
Our other contestants also deserve kudos for submitting amazing research images.
- Day 2's image of electron microscopy (in this case, white light scattered by gold nanorods) comes from the University of South Carolina.
- Day 3's image of auditory sensing is from the Brain and Behavior Laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
- Day 4's image is of quantum physics - trying to accurately measure Planck's constant - at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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