BHC's Research Group
The BHC Research Group provides UCLA undergraduates with guidance, mentorship, and resources to pursue independent research—from framing questions and building methods to presenting at conferences and integrating projects into campus labs.
Research Initiatives
UNET and Attention-Based Architectures for Denoising Functional Ultrasound Imaging
Alfred Ukudeev-Freeman, Avik Pamarthi, Naren Sathishkumar, Sahil Puranik, Ganeshreddy Venumbaka
Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) is a powerful neuroimaging technology based on sensitive Doppler signals to detect cerebral blood flow and volume, but physiological noise often obscures spatiotemporal detail. This work compares a classical Gaussian + band-pass filtering baseline against a 3-D U-Net baseline and a 3-D U-Net + Transformer trained on synthetically corrupted Caltech fUSI data to achieve data-driven denoising that preserves both fine spatial detail and global temporal consistency. Presented at the Society of Neuroscience 2025 Annual Conference and the UCLA Neuroscience Day Conference, awarded a UCLA Brain Research Initiative scholarship, and now being integrated into labs at UCLA.
Additional research initiatives currently in the works...