Asiye Tanko, a Biomedical Engineering student from Medipol University, successfully completed a 10-week summer internship at the Computational Modeling and Simulation Lab, Istanbul Technical University, under the mentorship of Hacer Duzman. Her internship focused on gaining practical experience in medical image processing and 3D modeling of both healthy and diseased coronary arteries.

During her internship, Asiye developed a complete image analysis pipeline, starting with DICOM data anonymization and image enhancement (including windowing, cropping, denoising, and vesselness filtering) of CT images. This was followed by segmentation of the aorta and coronary arteries, detection of calcified plaques with Agatston scoring, and segmentation of the aortic valve using 3D Slicer and Python. Additional steps included smoothing, centerline extraction, curve reformatting, straightened visualization, and hollow model generation. Her case studies encompassed normal and diseased arteries, such as stenosis, anomalous aortic origin of a coronary artery (AAOCA), and bypass-treated models, demonstrating how open-source tools can be applied to clinically relevant cardiovascular problems. Furthermore, the geometries and segmentations obtained were compared with reference 3D STL models or AI-generated results to validate accuracy and consistency.

We would like to congratulate Asiye on her dedication and hard work throughout the internship, and thank her sincerely for it. We wish her every success in her future studies and career.