Senior Success: Coder Ayushi Sangoi is Also the Class of 2020's Outstanding Engineer
As it embarks on clinical trials at children’s hospitals across the country, a novel vision therapy device developed by NJIT engineers is generating streams of data on eye movements in need of rapid and precise analysis. Enter Ayushi Sangoi ’20*, coder par excellence, to the algorithmic rescue.
As a senior capstone project, Sangoi and her teammates designed an automated eye movement analysis program called RETINAS to process the blinks, saccades (rapid, jerky motions) and vergent movements (coordinated action by both eyes to focus on near objects) the study participants produce. The device uses virtual reality-based games to test their eyes’ reaction time, speed and accuracy.
“We’re looking at sequences of more than 300 eye movements in less than two minutes and that is a lot for a human to analyze,” notes Sangoi, a double major in biomedical and computer engineering who was named Newark College of Engineering’s “outstanding engineer” for the class of 2020. By classifying eye movements as “good, maybe good and bad,” they taught the program to toss out enormous blinks, but to retain legible vergent movements disrupted by smaller blinks that can be removed by their algorithm.
The device, developed in NJIT’s Vision and Neural Engineering Laboratory, is designed to diagnose and correct a disorder known as convergence insufficiency (CI), which hinders coordinated movement between the eyes. CI, the most common binocular disorder in children and adults, can cause sore eyes, double and blurred vision and headaches, especially as symptoms are exacerbated by reading books and viewing screens.
“We need to speed up the time of data analysis – ultimately, to get it done in minutes instead of days – so that clinicians can share results with patients at the office,” says Tara Alvarez, a professor of biomedical engineering and the lab’s director. “Over time, they will quantitatively measure their progress.”
Sangoi is joining Alvarez’s lab as a Ph.D. student, funded in part by a coveted Provost’s Fellowship, where she will work on assessing data to determine how quickly people react to a prompt in the game, how closely they track a target’s trajectory, how accurately they hit it and how many times they can repeat their success. CI, she notes, slows eye reaction and movement times and prompts people to “blink as a crutch” when they are trying to focus.
“Ayushi has an incredible gift for coding, an understanding of science and clinical medicine and the ability to work on a team,” Alvarez says. “She’s the whole package.”
Her reputation preceded her. While still in high school, she had already sketched out a design for a medical device – a cushion to support people with hip fractures that would apply enough pressure to stay in place but not so much that it would cause bedsores. “The pillow, held in place by straps, would auto-inflate based on movement, while conforming to the person’s shape.”
As a high school senior, Sangoi was among the first 20 women chosen nationally to be a Kode with Karlie (now Klossy) Scholar at the Manhattan-based professional coding boot camp aimed at promoting diversity and equality in the tech industry. She and her teammates developed a web-based “cure for boredom” app that offered entertainment suggestions to both couch dwellers and urban explorers based on their interests.
At NJIT, she quickly jumped into the upper echelon of academic achievers while taking on two majors and coming up with applied research projects that incorporated both. Last year, she gave a podium presentation about the effects of the vision therapy team’s CI treatment at the Northeast Bioengineering Conference, while securing a National Science Foundation I-Corps grant to refine her automation software. She was recently inducted into the International Honor Society of IEEE.
But Sangoi is not only an engineer, inventor and coder. She’s also a teacher who has made her mark on NJIT’s Learning Center. This year, she recruited and trained enough people from the engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi, to allow the Center to offer walk-in appointments for engineering students. When the pandemic shut down the campus, they moved the service online. She will continue on the group’s executive board as a graduate student.
She’s also involved with Girl Up (photo, above), the United Nations-affiliated group that supports education for girls in impoverished regions. On campus, she helped organize events to introduce college students to the problems they face. One of their solutions was to raise money to buy bicycles for girls in Guatemala so they could travel quickly – and more safely – to school.
Sangoi will take on new challenges in Alvarez’s lab, which is also collaborating with imaging specialists to study connections between the brain and eye movements. The team is identifying areas of the brain that are activated during particular eye movements, as well as communications among different regions of the brain. By understanding these brain networks, they hope to improve therapies.
Alvarez notes, “Ayushi is a gifted programmer who will help lead this new analysis of how the brain directs the eyes to take in visual information.”
*Sangoi is a member of Albert Dorman Honors College
