Hanliang Xu

I’m Hanliang Xu, a sophomore majoring in Computer Science and Math. A fun fact about me is that since I came to the US two years ago, I’ve traveled to 12 states!

I became interested in applying my quantitative skills for medical imaging since my summer research project with Dr. Bennett Landman. Last summer, I attempted to harmonize connectivity matrices of diffusion MRI, removing site differences among datasets caused by variations in scanning protocol or scanner build. I lost track of time running experiments to explore whether and why our current statistical or deep learning methods are applicable to the harmonization task I tried to address.

Currently examining mummy data under the guidance of Dr. Katherine Van Schaik, I’m intrigued by the health and anthropology insights sealed in the mummy dataset which hasn’t been studied systematically since 2013. Together with other two undergraduate research assistants, I have written code to convert the DICOM series to NIFTI formats and extract header information on a large scale. I’m working on segmentation of the regions of interest for subsequent analysis.

In my spare time, you can find me fencing with friends in the Vanderbilt Fencing Club, watching classic movies at the Belcourt Theatre, and catching up with new deep learning papers on arXiv at the Stevenson Library.