Md Abulkalam Azad

Md Abulkalam Azad

he/him

PhD Candidate in Ultrasound Medical Imaging at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

About me

I am pursuing a PhD in ultrasound medical imaging in the Department of Circulation and Medical Imaging (ISB) at NTNU, focusing on leveraging computer vision and deep learning techniques.

Thesis title: Advancing Myocardial Function Imaging in Echocardiography using Vision Intelligence

  • Task 01: Develop and apply a novel deep learning-based point tracking method for motion estimation in echocardiographic data.
  • Task 02: Extend the automated strain estimation pipeline to support multiple cardiac views and regional myocardial strain analysis.
  • Task 03: Explore an AI-assisted, human-in-the-loop system to enhance strain measurement accuracy and support efficient data annotation.
  • Task 04: Validate the research-driven, fully automated strain estimation pipeline across relevant patient cohorts to assess clinical applicability.

Before joining ISB, I completed my master’s degree in Marine and Maritime Intelligent Robotics at the Department of Marine Technology, NTNU. This was an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree program jointly offered by Université de Toulon (UTLN) and NTNU. Following my first year at UTLN, I had the opportunity to work as a summer research student in the computer vision group at SINTEF Digital. During this time, my focus was on the 3D reconstruction of challenging objects using the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) technique. Consequently, my master’s thesis was also carried out within this group, where I delved into Multi-label Video Classification for Underwater Ship Inspection. My research specifically revolved around the investigation and analysis of multi-attention-based transformer and vision transformer models within the context of underwater environments for video understanding.

I worked as a Software Engineer at SAMSUNG R&D in Bangladesh for one and a half years before starting my master’s study. During this period, I earned valuable skills in different Samsung Software Development Kits (SDKs) such as AR Emoji, Galaxy Watch Face, Samsung IAP, and Samsung DeX. 

In 2019, I completed my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at United International University in Bangladesh. During my undergraduate program, I had the privilege of receiving the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship, which allowed me to pursue a 10-month academic stint at Universität Bremen in Germany. As part of this experience, I undertook my thesis project, which concentrated on the Enhencement of a Logistic Simulation Scenario using 3D Computer Graphics.