As we walked through the UNC Women’s hospital doors last week, we were excited to be back in the clinical setting, but this time in a different capacity, as interns on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded Fetal Age and Machine Learning Initiative (FAMLI).
The Fetal Age and Machine Learning Initiative is a collaborative project being conducted by the UNC Global Women’s Health Division, NC State University and the University of Zambia School of Medicine. The overarching goal of the project is to develop a robust, inexpensive, widely deployable ultrasound device that can assess gestational age and other important obstetric conditions while requiring minimal operator skills.
We were welcomed by our preceptor and a friendly team of sonographers and researchers.
This summer, as interns, we will be contributing to this project by annotating ultrasound images that can be used to train machine learning algorithms to correctly assess gestational age and other diagnoses. Our experience will enable us to learn to properly identify and annotate ultrasound images of fetal parts, and assist in building a system that will help future annotators learn similar skills and perform the annotation tasks consistently.
Finally, we say this feels like family because we have a unique advantage of meeting with the team both in-person and virtually, and participating on conference calls that involves a diverse interprofessional team such as clinicians (OB/GYN, RN, sonographer), research staff (research assistants, managers), data managers, financiers (Gates Foundation), and collaborators (engineers and N.C. State and Google).
Watch out for future blog posts focusing on the second part of our internship where we get to travel and meet the team all in the way in Lusaka, Zambia!
-Enam and Munguu