Projects

I've been researching the use of dental Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) for opportunistic bone density assessment for the past three years at the University of Pennsylvania under Dr. Chamith Rajapakse. The study looks into whether routine dental CBCT scans - more widely available and less expensive and radiation-intensive than conventional CT, can be used to find early signs of osteoporosis.

In order to facilitate cross-anatomical validation, we also assess tooth density and femur CT scans in addition to our primary analysis of radiographic density patterns in the C3 cervical vertebra.

We extracted voxel-level intensity features from more than 1,000 patient scans, calibrated density values across imaging modalities, and compared metrics derived from CBCT with the clinical gold standard, DXA-based T-scores.

I found strong connections between CBCT intensity patterns and DXA measurements in preliminary results, suggesting that CBCT could serve as an accessible, opportunistic screening method—especially for patients who regularly undergo dental imaging but may not receive dedicated bone density evaluations.

This research has broader clinical implications: if dental CBCT scans can reliably flag low bone density, dentists and oral surgeons could play a critical role in identifying at-risk individuals earlier, enabling timely medical follow-up.

Our ongoing work focuses on refining segmentation methods, normalizing scan data for cross-machine compatibility, and developing machine-learning models to automate risk classification with greater precision.

For the past year, I've conducted research under Dr. Chandrasekhar Nataraj at Villanova University exploring my project, Early Fault Detection in Endodontic Instruments Using Signal Processing and Machine Learning.

I developed a real-time system that identifies early signs of stress and microfractures in dental root-canal files.

My findings revealed that monitoring irregular frequency magnitudes and unstable wavelet energy levels are reliable predictors of tool fatigue—often appearing well before a file visibly fails.

Elephancy - an immersive VR visualization tool created to help people who have aphantasia.

Our prompts expanded into a structured scene description by a language model.

Through immersive external imagery, this develops a new type of accessible technology for Aphantasia.

3D Anatomical Model from CT Scans is a highly advanced medical imaging project.

With 3D Slicer as the primary image-processing software.

These processed models are further made compatible with AR/VR systems.

High Degree Polynomial Root Solver is an object of a Java-based numerical computation project.

In order to check the accuracy, comparisons with manually derived approximations.

The work earned 1st place at the Delaware Valley Science Fair.