Adam Saunders

I am a PhD student researching medical imaging.

Adam Saunders at SPIE Medical Imaging I presented at SPIE Medical Imaging for the first time

I recently got the chance to travel to San Diego to present research I performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the 2023 SPIE Medical Imaging conference. This was the first professional conference I’ve attended, and getting the chance to go as an undergraduate was a great experience. I was lucky enough to receive a student travel grant from SPIE to attend.

I was definitely a bit nervous at first to be attending the conference by myself. In fact, I had never traveled alone. However, everyone at the conference was very friendly. I got to meet lots of people from all over the world - Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, and all over the US as well! It was so refreshing to meet people working in medical imaging, especially other students. A highlight for me was talking to students from the MASI Lab at Vanderbilt University, as I’ve applied to join this lab next year as a PhD student.

As someone just starting out in medical imaging, it was very nice to see all of the interesting research going on. The keynote speakers were really fantastic. I particularly enjoyed hearing Zachary Lipton from Carnegie Mellon talk about how the attention mechanism is not a great interpretability measure for deep learning models. If I’m summarizing his talk correctly, his team has found that we can have vastly different attention weights and still get the same accuracy. This result was a bit sombering for people like me who have advertized the attention mechanism as a way of boosting interpretability for image classification. Overall, the talks were very thought-provoking and introduced me to a lot of new ideas.

I got to present the work I performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory titled “A comparison of histopathology imaging comprehension algorithms based on multiple instance learning.” In this work, we used a supercomputer to compare several multiple instance learning algorithms for whole-slide image classification of cancer datasets. We found that algorithms using the attention mechanism all performed better than those without. It was great to be able to present my work to people who really understood the problem. I had some great conversations with people about what this work meant and how it compared with other researchers’ findings.

I also got to explore San Diego a bit. I went to Mission Beach with a group of students and got to see the Pacific Ocean for the first time! It was cold and rainy - very unseasonable weather for San Diego. I also got to go to Old Town and do some shopping and eating, which was nice.

SPIE Medical Imaging was a great conference, and they were a particularly warm and welcoming group for a first-timer. I hope I’m able to return sometime in the future!