Mathematics Professor Awarded a $434,000 Grant from the National Institutes of Health
This is a renewal of Angel Pineda’s current grant continuing his research into MRI effectiveness and efficiency.
Angel Pineda, Ph.D., professor of mathematics, has been awarded a three-year, $434,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This new grant is a competitive renewal of Pineda’s current NIH grant and will continue to support his project entitled, “Optimizing Acquisition and Reconstruction of Under-sampled MRI for Signal Detection.” The original research was initially funded by the NIH in May 2020. 
“Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a versatile imaging modality that suffers from slow acquisition times,” Pineda said. “This is a challenge for both time-sensitive applications and for patient throughput. Accelerating MRI scanning times would benefit patients and improve public health both by reducing the time patients need to be in the scanner and in reducing the cost of healthcare.”
Pineda said this research project advances a larger scientific effort to accelerate MRI while maintaining diagnostic quality by optimizing data collection and deep learning methods to generate images, using detection and localization of subtle lesions as the measure of image quality.
The grant will enable six Manhattan College students (two per year during the three-year grant period) to assist Pineda in his research. It provides an invaluable opportunity for these students to participate in hands-on biomedical research, incorporating applied mathematics, statistics and data science. Students will conduct experiments of human detection and localization of signals and develop mathematical models to predict human and machine performance.
“This grant has been really helpful to me as it allowed me to work as a research analyst under the guidance of Dr. Pineda, on a project that seeks to bring in huge advancements in the field of medical imaging,” says Rehan Mehta ’24, a Brother K. Fitzgerald & Thomas J. Smith Scholar. “Because of this grant, I have been able to gain vast experience in programming, computational applications of statistics and linear algebra and it has allowed me to present my work to a large audience. It has also connected me with Dr. Pineda, whose mentorship and guidance has been invaluable to me.”