International Students

Leanne is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in the Division of Biomedical Engineering. Her research work is focused on building an ASTM standard testing rig for mechanical testing of shoulder implant designs. Loosening of the glenoid component is a primary cause of shoulder prosthesis failure and that existing standardized mechanical test methods for new glenoid designs provide limited understanding of the loosening behavior of the component, it is proposed that advancement of the test methods would provide better opportunity for evaluation of future glenoid designs. To investigate this, her research aims at building an augmented AST F2028 standard test apparatus that can measure vertical, horizontal, and tilt motion of glenoid implant edges during loading and report the feasibility and validity of this test apparatus. She is co-supervised by Prof. Sudesh Sivarasu and Dr. Bhushan Borotikar.

Herve is currently pursuing his PhD from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in the Division of Biomedical Engineering. His PhD project aims to design a framework for cross-modality synthesis. Specifically, to generate a synthetic computed tomography (sCT) from the patient's conventional MRI, through volumetric intensity Gaussian process model (VIGPM). The VIGPM provides a means to encode each modality to a latent space, from which modality samples can be obtained and any observation parametrized. The VIGPM is a statistical model built to encode the volumetric image in the eigenspace of the GP, capturing the relationship among the training data in each modality. Herve is co-supervised by Dr. Tinashe Mutsvangwa, Prof. Valerie Burdin, and Dr. Bhushan Borotikar.

Jasper is a PhD student from the Institute of Biomechanics and Orthopedics at the German Sport University, Cologne. Jasper’s research project is focused on the effect of hip joint loading in the rehabilitation of children with cerebral palsy. He specifically focuses on a disorder called developmental dysplasia of the hip and plans to incorporate experimental and musculoskeletal modeling tools to achieve the research objectives. Jasper is co-supervised by Prof. Uwe Kersting, Dr. Cynthia Fantini Pagani, and Dr. Bhushan Borotikar.

Yvonne is currently pursuing her PhD from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in the Division of Biomedical Engineering. Her research project is focused on experimental and image-based understanding of bone mineral density (BMD) of spine and its implications on osteoporotic population. For experimental analysis, she has used cadaveric lumbar spine specimen to extract volumetric BMD from quantitative CT scans, aerial BMD from DEXA scans along with bone ashing as a gold standard. She is currently building image based quantification models to extract BMD and other anatomical parameters. Yvonne is co-supervised by Dr. Tinashe Mutsvangwa and Dr. Bhushan Borotikar.

Catherine is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in the Division of Biomedical Engineering. Her research project is focussed on developing a neural differentiable renderer for 3D reconstruction of X-ray images. This work aims to improve 3D X-ray image reconstruction from deep learning models through optimisation of the 3D reconstruction using 2D image supervision. She is currently building a statistical shape, pose and intensity model to generate synthetic data for the training of the neural differentiable renderer. Catherine is co-supervised by Dr. Tinashe Mutsvangwa (University of Cape Town, South Africa), Dr. Bernhard Egger (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) and Dr. Bhushan Borotikar.