June 26, 2020, by Lee Mei Kee

UNM BMS Alumni Testimonial: Soong Wenxin (2018)

Graduating with a BSc (Hons) Biomedical Sciences was not something you can do with your eyes shut. The journey was long and lonely, but rewarding. Back in 2017, I was selected as the only exchange student to the UK campus. It was indeed challenging in the beginning especially when my mates in crime were not with me. However, this experience has broadened my horizons and has connected me to tons of opportunities.

I always thought I would be doing laboratory-based research until a Professor from the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, approached me with his research idea. It was definitely astonishing as I had never imagined myself in an entirely different field. The project was to utilize artificial intelligence to improve the diagnosis of the silent killer – cardiovascular diseases. Many of the patients were asymptomatic before the occurrence of sudden stroke or myocardial infarction. My job is to identify and to extract the facial features that may be associated with pulsatile blood flow using computer vision techniques. Although the project does require lots of coding and programming work, it also requires you to have prior knowledge about the mechanism of action of the diseases so that you could tackle the most relevant facial features to be used for analysis.

I thank Nottingham for equipping me not only with scientific knowledge but also many transferable skills that have successfully secured me in an interdisciplinary research field.

Article written by: Soong Wenxin (BSc Biomedical Sciences Graduate of Year 2018) is currently a PhD student at Monash University Malaysia.

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