Thulasi Bikku

Thulasi Bikku, Rubén A. Fritz, Yamil J. Colón et al.

Identifying chemical compounds is essential in several areas of science and engineering. Laser-based techniques are promising for autonomous compound detection because the optical response of materials encodes enough electronic and vibrational information for remote chemical identification. This has been exploited using the fingerprint region of infrared absorption spectra, which involves a dense set of absorption peaks that are unique to individual molecules, thus facilitating chemical identification. However, optical identification using visible light has not been realized. Using decades of experimental refractive index data in the scientific literature of pure organic compounds and polymers over a broad range of frequencies from the ultraviolet to the far-infrared, we develop a machine learning classifier that can accurately identify organic species based on a single-wavelength dispersive measurement in the visible spectral region, away from absorption resonances. The optical classifier proposed here could be applied to autonomous material identification protocols or applications.

Saksham Kumar, D Sridhar Aditya, T Likhil Kumar et al.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) has emerged as a major cause of preventable blindness in recent times. With timely screening and intervention, the condition can be prevented from causing irreversible damage. The work introduces a state-of-the-art Ordinal Regression-based DR Detection framework that uses the APTOS-2019 fundus image dataset. A widely accepted combination of preprocessing methods: Green Channel (GC) Extraction, Noise Masking, and CLAHE, was used to isolate the most relevant features for DR classification. Model performance was evaluated using the Quadratic Weighted Kappa, with a focus on agreement between results and clinical grading. Our Ordinal Regression approach attained a QWK score of 0.8992, setting a new benchmark on the APTOS dataset.