Image Processing in Software Engineering Overview

Fellow presentation and intro to your career path

‍Hey folks, my name is Divya Inamdar and I am from India currently located in Boston. I came to the US in 2018 to pursue Masters in Electrical Engineering at Drexel University, Philadelphia. I was looking forward to getting this degree right after graduating from Bachelors in Engineering in India. My primary motivation to seek higher education was to gain more practical experience in the field of my interest which is Medical Image processing and have an opportunity to increase my knowledge along with experiencing the education system outside.

In my last year of Bachelors, I was introduced to this subject called Digital Image processing as an Elective where we were taught ways of manipulating 2D images and understanding the source of how pixels form images along with more concepts. I was fascinated by the theory of Image processing, and we learnt a few methods of improving image quality which could make the data of better use for various applications that involve imaging. I found universities in the US that have courses focused on image processing and labs that I could possibly join and work with Professors to collaborate on projects. Drexel University turned out to be one of them that worked out for my profile and interests. Coming from a background in Electronics and Telecommunication, my master's in electrical engineering course had quite an overlap to the courses I was looking for.

Little did I know that my horizons would expand more in Medical Image Processing specifically. I got a chance to work in 3 different labs which had different projects focusing on domains of medical imaging like histopathology, X-rays to Fluorescence Microscopy imaging. One after the other, my experiences expanded in the medical domain, and I was also able to get a chance to learn medical image processing segmentations and algorithms through a course. I also had some exposure to the genetics world through one course which helped me build my signal processing knowledge in genes.

While my last quarter of masters was going on, I knew that I wanted to continue contributing to the Medical domain through my knowledge and experience. I applied to all Medical domain companies for the positions that went with my profile and I wanted to gain more industrial experience and was prepared to learn as needed, so I was inclined to work at startups since it was my first ever job post education. Fortunately, I was offered a job at a Medical startup based in Cardiovascular domain. I was hired for doing Software Engineering using my image processing skills and knowledge but I learnt so much more than that including understanding CT scans and DICOMS, working on cases like a radiologist would read them and develop the new version of the current application on web. As they say in a startup you wear multiple hats, that turned out to be my case and I was involved in various areas of the product development from designing, gathering requirements and implementing code to regression testing for legacy versions of the software.

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‍Career options 

• ‍Electrical Engineer
  Designing, maintaining, implementing, or improving electrical instruments, facilities, components, equipment products, or systems for industrial, commercial, or domestic purposes.
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• ‍Biomedical Engineer
  ‍Design and development of medical devices and equipment. Create innovative solutions that improve patient care and treatment outcomes.
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• ‍Software Engineer
  ‍Designs, develops and maintains computer software at a company. They use their creativity and technical skills and apply the principles of software engineering to help solve new and ongoing problems for an organization.
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• ‍Image Processing Engineer
  Collaborating with the data science team through research and developing image processing algorithms to solve different problems.
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• ‍Computer Vision Developer
  Develop, test, debug, deploy, and maintain computer vision algorithms and hardware for different environments. Collect data to advance the ability of computers to solve problems by making sense of images.
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• ‍Design Engineer
  Research and develop designs for projects in a range of sectors, from construction to software, medical equipment and manufacturing.
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• ‍Project Engineer
  Oversee the planning, coordination, and execution of engineering projects. Manage resources, budgets, and timelines to ensure successful project completion while meeting client requirements.
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• ‍Image Analysis Research Specialist
  Evaluate a library of publicly available image processing tools and models; develop user-friendly pipelines for image segmentation, classification, and -omics analytics; develop custom image processing and quantification tools; work closely with the facility’s data scientist to curate imaging data and metadata for importation into knowledge graphs and to ensure harmonization of training datasets across imaging modalities; and be part of a broader developing digital framework for integration of imaging and non-imaging data.

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Main hard skills you use on daily basis in your current job

• ‍Typescript and Python
  I leverage my proficiency in Typescript and python to carry out tasks for implementing the web interface related stages of the application to REST api calls  and  contract to work with the UI. I acquired a foundation of python and HTML during my studies where i learnt the fundamentals and applied it to various projects.
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• ‍Github
  Version control platform, allows me to manage and coordinate coding projects within the team and with cross-teams too. It is used to track changes, update my code with the latest code on daily basis, do peer code reviews with my teammates and tracking commits.
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• ‍Command Line Interface
  ‍Using command line for linux servers for debugging makes it easier to access them and check configurations along with logs to fix/find possible errors efficiently. At my company we use it to maintain VMs and online debugging by sshing into the remote servers to troubleshoot.
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• ‍JIRA
  ‍Since we follow Agile process at our company, engineers work is tracked using JIRA. I had worked for my volunteer job where they used JIRA. Learnt my basics of JIRA from there so could implement there here as was helpful as I transitioned towards product management. ‍

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Soft skills you use on daily basis in your current job

• ‍Critical Thinking
  ‍In order to find solutions for convoluted problems, critical thinking helps in analyzing the situation, finding facts and evidence further to help in order to make a judgement by application of rational and unbiased evaluation. It is a part of problem solving and an essential skill for engineers and researchers.
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• ‍Teamwork
  ‍Collaborative effort of the group to achieve a common goal in the most efficient way is the definition of teamwork. Coming from a startup, team work is key work. Collaboration becomes easier but effective outcome is equally necessary. I learnt that every developer functions differently so adapting to each others methods and finding the best way to achieve the goal is where teamwork lies.
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• ‍Communication
  ‍Information transfer is what communication is all about. Ability to discuss work with cross teams and getting everyone on the same page about the information is important. I have experienced benefits of efficient communication quite often at work, it helps get work done faster too since the team is aware of the steps needed to complete tasks and everyone is in coordination.

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‍Your personal path‍

Everyone’s job search experiences are different and each one faces different hurdles to land up in a job. The struggle was more for me since my graduation was at the time of the COVID pandemic and the job market was highly unstable. I had to make sure I stop the unemployment clock post graduation since I did not have a job offer until Jan 2021 and I graduated in June 2020.

I worked in my professor’s lab, did some volunteer work at the side while my job search was the primary focus. The work at lab was inclined to my course in Image processing. Working at the lab has been a great addition to my resume, as it has allowed me to develop my programming skills and gain practical experience in Medical Imaging field.  I was active on LinkedIn and had all the relevant filters checked on job portals like Indeed, AngelList and others. Networking on LinkedIn and reaching out to friends and family to network for contacts and sharing resumes was my routine. The positive part of wanting to contribute in the medical field was that the job industry there had started opening up more as compared to the others.

Seeing more job postings and getting interviews at least once a week kept me motivated. Based on the company size, every company had different ways of interview process, for J&J my interview was really tough in terms of the in-depth questions asked in the field to test concepts. I felt like I would have been a better candidate for the position if I had a little more experience. For the rest, interviews went well but they found better candidates so that did not work out. Being an international student, a lot of companies were not open to sponsoring visas but I was still prepared to start work with them if offered a job since we have the 2 years OPT STEM extension to help there.

One of my friends at Drexel happened to find the posting for my current job and share it with me. I interviewed with the CEO first and then then CTO who happened to be the founder too. My interview with the CTO was such a different experience and I liked the way he structured our conversation and wanted to know my ideas of the application of the knowledge that I had and I was offered the job later. I was extremely grateful for all the days that went by and everyone who helped me go through those. I was the first immigrant to my current job so had to get the company on-board with the documents and process information but they were really supportive of everything that was needed to be done.

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