Highlighting SPIE 2018 student presentations – James Ferguson
James Ferguson is a mechanical engineering graduate student in the Medical Engineering and Discovery (MED) Lab, said presenting at SPIE Medical Imaging this year was “a fantastic experience for me from a professional development standpoint.”
As lead author, Ferguson presented the paper titled, “Toward image-guided partial nephrectomy with the da Vinci robot: exploring intraoperative re- registration approaches.”
The MED Lab is under the direction of Robert Webster, PhD, associate professor of mechanical engineering, which is part of the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering (VISE).
“The overall atmosphere at SPIE is incredibly welcoming,” Ferguson said. “This definitely made for a nice, low-pressure first conference presentation for me. Making my slide show and practicing my talk was nerve wracking, but once I stepped in front of the audience, these feelings seemed to melt away.”
He had the opportunity to speak with other researchers about some potential uses for the research project his team had not yet considered, which was immensely valuable. So were discussions with his conference roommate, another VISE member, who works with image processing.
“I learned a lot from the whole process in general, and in the future, writing and presenting won’t seem so daunting,” Ferguson said.
This is the third of five short stories highlighting VISE students who presented SPIE Medical Imaging 2018.
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