Amy Jin ’18 has been named a 2018 Davidson Fellow Laureate in the technology category for her project on deep learning to help track surgical instruments using video. The application will help surgeons to improve surgical care by automatically assessing operative skill, “given that approximately half of all surgical complications are avoidable, many of which are attributed to poor individual and team performance,” according to the summary on the institute’s webpage. The summary continues: “Evaluating operative performance requires expert supervision and is a manual process that is time-consuming and subjective. Thus, Amy leveraged region-based convolutional neural networks to facilitate operative skill assessment, extracting visual assessment metrics such as tool usage timelines, motion heat maps, and tool trajectory maps. her summary notes.”

As a Laureate recipient, Jin will receive a $50,000 grant to assist with her research. Only 12 students are so honored nationwide each year. Read all about it on the Davidson Institute page. In addition, Stanford Medicine magazine published an article telling Jin’s story and noting the value of the development. 

Davidson Scholarships are awarded to young scholars; each must be 18 or younger to receive the grant. Categories include science, technology, engineering, mathematics, music, literature, philosophy and Outside the Box. Projects must contribute a work recognized by experts in the field as an outstanding accomplishment that has the potential to benefit society.

 The 2018 Davidson Fellows were honored at a reception in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 28. Rajiv Movva ’18 also received a Davidson Scholarship; read about his project in Harker News.