Blake VanBerlo, a PhD candidate in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, is one of this year’s recipients of a prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. The scholarship is valued at $150,000 over three years, and recognizes a doctoral student who has exhibited academic excellence, research potential and leadership.
VanBerlo received the award in recognition of his machine learning research: he is training self-supervised machine learning models to analyze unlabeled lung ultrasound data, with the hope of improving the accuracy and speed at which medical practitioners can understand lung ultrasound results.
Lung ultrasounds are an exciting and essential diagnostic tool, VanBerlo says, because they are fast, inexpensive, and safe when compared to a CT scan or chest X-ray. “You can wheel these units right to a patient’s bedside,” he says, “and use them as a screening tool to narrow down your differential diagnosis quickly.”
Such diagnostic tools are more important than ever, as many patients have experienced lingering respiratory effects in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, VanBerlo explains, “there aren’t a lot of trained professionals out there who know how to interpret that ultrasound data.”
VanBerlo’s unique academic trajectory ideally suits him to tackle this problem. In undergrad, he entered Western University as a Schulich Leader excited about science and planning to go to medical school. He ended up majoring in software engineering, then completed 2 years of medical school before realizing he was more interested in the problem-solving and research side of medicine than the clinical side.
Before he left medical school, however, he befriended Dr. Robert Arntfield, a professor of medicine who was interested in the possible impacts of machine learning on ultrasound interpretation. VanBerlo is a founding member of Deep Breathe, Dr. Arntfield’sproject aiming to use AI to improve lung ultrasound diagnostics. In 2020, this line of inquiry brought VanBerlo to the University of Waterloo for a master’s of computer science, and now he is continuing his work in his PhD.
VanBerlo’s PhD research will help automate the diagnostic process, increasing the accessibility of lung ultrasounds as a diagnostic tool by training a machine learning model to recognize important patterns and features in lung ultrasounds. His work also addresses a secondary problem with the technology: much of the ultrasound data that is available to researchers is unlabeled data. “There’s a lot of data,” he says, “but often no clinicians went back to label it.”
VanBerlo addresses this problem by employing a self-supervised learning model. He provides his model with the unlabeled data, and it looks for existing patterns or categories without being told what to look for. Then, he provides his self-supervised model with a more specific problem – for example, looking for anomalies that indicate lung tissue damage – with the hope that the previous self-supervised learning will improve its efficacy.
“We want to produce better automated lung ultrasound systems that are accurate and trustworthy,” VanBerlo says. “If we have more automation in lung ultrasound interpretation, then these tools can be used more frequently in diagnostics in critical care settings.”
“We want to produce better automated lung ultrasound systems that are accurate and trustworthy. If we have more automation in lung ultrasound interpretation, then these tools can be used more frequently in diagnostics in critical care settings.”
“Winning the Vanier lets me devote my attention to a space where I think there are not enough people working, and it gives me the time to give it my all,” he says. “That would not be possible without this kind of support.” In turn, he says, he would never have been able to achieve what he has without the unwavering encouragement of his wife Olivia, “the most supportive human being that I’ve ever met.” He is also grateful to his PhD supervisors Jesse Hoey (Computer Science) and Alexander Wong (Systems Design Engineering), as well as to Dr. Arntfield and the Deep Breathe team.
“It’s very meaningful,” he says, “to have the ability to pursue a research question born out of a very real need.”
You can read more about Blake VanBerlo on his website, and you can read more about Deep Breathe here. Learn more about the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, and see the full list of this 2023 winners, on their website.