Fahim Ahmed Zaman, a University of Iowa PhD candidate in electrical and computer engineering, has been awarded a Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate College. 

Th fellowship provides an opportunity for PhD students to benefit from a final semester of protected and supported time to focus on completing their scholarly research activities and the writing of their dissertations. It comes with a one-time fellowship award of $10,700. 

Zaman described his dissertation focus as, "Qualitative and quantitative analysis on the segmented objects with various medical imaging modalities are widely used for monitoring disease related pathology. In this dissertation, we introduce novel and robust deep-learning models to efficiently correct segmentation inaccuracies of objects (e.g., heart, lung etc.) in 3D medical images, which will significantly reduce annotation time of physicians in clinical settings. Furthermore, we propose to use the deep-learned-models in translational research setting to predict the short and long-term prognoses of cardiovascular diseases."

Zaman is mentored by Xiaodong Wu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and an affiliate of the Iowa Technology Institute.