Integrative Neuromonitoring and
Critical Care Informatics Group

Professor Thomas Heldt

People

Current Members

Thomas Heldt

Associate Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering

Thomas Heldt joined the MIT faculty in 2013 as Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science and as Assistant Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Additionally, Thomas is a Principal Investigator with MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE).

Thomas studied Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany, at Yale University, and MIT. In 2004, he received the PhD degree in Medical Physics from MIT’s Division of Health Sciences and Technology and commenced postdoctoral training at MIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronics Systems. Prior to joining the faculty, Thomas was a Principal Research Scientist with the RLE, where he co-founded and co-directed (with Prof. George Verghese) the Computational Physiology and Clinical Inference Group.

Thomas’s research interests focus on signal processing, mathematical modeling, and model identification to support real-time clinical decision making, monitoring of disease progression, and titration of therapy, primarily in neurocritical and neonatal critical care. In particular, Thomas is interested in developing a mechanistic understanding of physiologic systems, and in formulating appropriately chosen computational physiologic models for improved patient care. His research is conducted in close collaboration with colleagues at MIT and clinicians from Boston-area hospitals.

RLE Bio | thomas@mit.edu

Samantha La Motte

Administrative Assistant
slamotte@mit.edu

Kai E. Thomenius

Visiting Research Scientist

Kai E. Thomenius is currently a Research Scientist at the Institute of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT, Cambridge, MA. Until recently, he was a Chief Technologist in Diagnostics & Biomedical Technologies at General Electric Global Research in Niskayuna, NY, USA. Previously, he has held senior R&D roles at ATL Ultrasound Inc. (now Philips Healthcare), Interspec Inc., Elscint Inc., as well as other companies. In addition, he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Thomenius’ academic background is in electrical engineering with a minor in physiology with degrees from Rutgers University. His long-term interests have been in beamformation and miniaturization of ultrasonic scanners, propagation of acoustic waves in inhomogeneous media, delivery and drugs and DNA to cells, and gaining physiological information from echoes that arise from acoustic beams.  His current focus is on estimation of speed of sound in tissues and the impact that its variations has on image quality.  Dr. Thomenius is a Fellow of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine.

Daniel Teichmann

Postdoctoral Associate

Daniel Teichmann received Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. (Ph.D.) degrees in electrical engineering from RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, in 2009 and 2015, respectively. In his doctoral thesis, he worked on non-contact monitoring of cardiorespiratory activity. In 2015, he was appointed Senior Scientist and head of the medical instrumentation group at the Philips Chair for Medical Information Technology at RWTH Aachen University. In 2018, he began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Integrative Neuromonitoring and Critical Care Informatics Group of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering & Science. His research interests include unobtrusive vital sign monitoring, biomedical signal processing, and sensor fusion.

Frederick Vonberg

Research Affiliate

Freddie is a Research Fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and a Research Affiliate in the INCCI group at MIT. After completing his medical degree and an intercalated research degree in Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and University College London in the UK, Freddie worked as a medical doctor in an academic post at Oxford University’s Clinical Academic Graduate School and the John Radcliffe Hospital. During this time, he had clinical jobs in acute general medicine, intensive care and emergency medicine. His previous research was in computational genetics. He came to the US in 2015 to begin his research fellowship in the field of cerebral autoregulation with Prof. Robert Tasker, director of Neurocritical Care at Boston Children’s Hospital. At MIT, Freddie is using different measurement techniques, including transcranial Doppler and near-infrared spectroscopy to measure changes in cerebral hemodynamics in response to the autonomic challenges imposed by a tilt-table.

Jeffrey Peterson

Research Affiliate

Jeffrey Peterson is a Research Affiliate at INCCI from the Massachusetts General Hospital Emergency Department where he is a software engineer developing real-time clinical decision support technologies. Prior to joining MIT, Jeff spent two years as a Clinical Engineer for the MGH Medical Device Plug and Play Interoperability Research Lab (MD PnP) where he worked on medical device communication standards and prototypes, including OpenICE (the Open-source Integrated Clinical Environment). He holds an M.S. in Biomedical and Clinical Engineering and a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering, both from the University of Connecticut in 2013 and 2011, respectively. Jeff worked as a Clinical Engineer at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, MA where he completed his Master’s thesis on clinical alarm management. His research interests include improving patient care and safety by surfacing new insights from data within existing medical device systems and improving the pathway for adoption of novel healthcare IT research.

Jonathan Birjiniuk

Graduate Student

Jonathan Birjiniuk is pursuing is PhD in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. His work uses signal processing and modeling to understand the control of heart rate in patients with brain injury. Prior to commencing his PhD studies, Jonathan received his SB and MEng degrees in EECS from MIT.

Rohan Jaishankar

Graduate Student

Rohan is pursuing his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT. He received his Bachelor’s of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras in 2015. He worked as a research intern in the Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in 2014, where he worked on a project on sepsis detection using a network-based classification approach in Prof. Sridevi Sarma’s lab. His current research is in developing a spectral technique to non-invasively estimate intracranial pressure of patients in ICUs, utilizing the arterial blood pressure and cerebral blood flow velocity waveforms and deploying these systems in hospitals.

Syed M. Imaduddin

Graduate Student

Syed M. Imaduddin is a first year Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department at MIT where he is working in Professor Thomas Heldt’s group. He graduated from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Pakistan in 2015 with a major in Electrical Engineering. Imad is interested in developing model based biomedical signal processing algorithms and devices to monitor and regulate patient health. He is presently working on algorithms for continuous noninvasive blood pressure estimation.

James Lynch

Graduate Student

James Lynch is pursuing a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT. He received a B.S. in physics and applied mathematics from the University of Rhode Island in 2015. He is currently conducting research with the Integrative Neuromonitoring and Critical Care Informatics Group. Ongoing research topics include a collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital where he is participating in the development of a consolidated database of patients presenting to the emergency room.

Gladynel Saavedra Peña

Graduate Student

Gladynel Saavedra Peña received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez (UPRM) in 2016. Gladynel is currently a PhD student pursuing her Master’s Degree under the supervision of Prof. Vivienne Sze and Prof. Thomas Heldt. Her research focuses on developing models and algorithms for detecting the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease in patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment and early dementia. These models and algorithms will eventually be transferred onto low power systems. Gladynel was a recipient of the MIT Presidential Fellowship in 2016.

Hsin-Yu Jane Lai

Graduate Student

Hsin-Yu Lai received the B. S. degree in EE and math from National Taiwan University. She completed her M. S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2016 with Prof. Alan Oppenheim on amplitude sampling. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. with Prof. Vivienne Sze and Prof. Thomas Heldt. Her research interests include signal processing, inference, and machine learning.

Mattie Wasiak

Graduate Student

Mattie Wasiak is pursuing her B.S. in Computer Science and M.Eng. with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence at MIT. She is interested in the application of statistics and machine learning to healthcare. Her current research focuses on analyzing the cleanliness of large physiological data streams collected in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and applying statistical techniques on these streams to identify clinical, demographic, physiological, and workflow factors that place preterm infants at risk for hypoxia and hyperoxia. Past research with the Lab of Computational Physiology at MIT involved leveraging machine learning to predict treatment strategies for ICU patients suffering from sepsis and hypotension. Other work experience includes internships at Google, IBM, Thomson Reuters and Micronotes. 

Sabrina Liu

SuperUROP Student

Sabrina Liu is an undergraduate student studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is interested in interdisciplinary research involving signal processing, algorithms, and BioEECS. Her SuperUROP project will involve developing and validating a sensor fusion algorithm to gather cardiorespiratory data from dental patients through noncontact sensor signals.

Rajib Mondal

Visiting Graduate Student

Rajib is a visiting student researcher at MIT, where he is working on micro emboli detection through ultrasound systems in ECMO and life support machines. He is a M.Sc.-student in electrical engineering at RWTH Aachen University and a 4th-year medical student at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. He has previously been a research intern at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, working on topics related with perception, computer vision, and deep learning. During his Bachelor thesis, he worked in Prof. Leonhardt’s research group in Aachen and built a pulsatile cerebrospinal model with a cardio-vascular coupling for hydrocephalus patients. His current interests are in biomedical signal processing and quantitative modeling of physiological systems to give doctors tools that help them to make better decisions in critical situations.

Alumni

James Noraky

MEng (2014)
A spectral approach to noninvasive model-based estimation of intracranial pressure.

James completed his PhD with Prof. Vivienne Sze at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and is now with Analog Devices, Inc.

Ehinwenma (Ehi) Nosakhare

SM (2015)
QT-Interval Adaptation to Changes in Autonomic Balance

After finishing her SM with the group, Ehi joined Prof. Roz Picard’s group at the Media Lab for her PhD. She since joined Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

Rebecca Mieloszyk

PhD EECS (2016)
Learning and Model-Based Approaches to Improved Patient Monitoring, Assessment and Treatment in Capnography and Procedural Sedation

After graduating with her PhD, Becky initially joined Philips Healthcare. She is currently with Microsoft Research in the Seattle area.

Andrea Fanelli

Andrea was a postdoc (2013-2017) and Research Scientist (2017-2018) in the group, working primarily on the noninvasive ICP estimation approach. He joined Dolby Research Labs as a Senior Staff Scientist in neural computing.

Varesh Prasad

PhD HST (2019)

Varesh defended his PhD in Medical Engineering / Medical Physics in May 2019 on the topic of early detection of sepsis in an Emergency Department population. Following a short postdoctoral position in the lab, he joined Verily as a research engineer.

Eun Cho

SB (2015)
Understanding the Intracranial Pressure Waveform Morphology

Eun was a SuperUROP student in the group. Eun did her medical training at Seoul National University School of Medicine where she also recently concluded her internship.

Taibo Li

SB (2015)
Reducing False Alarms in the Intensive Care Unit

After graduating from MIT, Taibo joined the MD/PhD program at Johns Hopkins University.

Zixi Liu

SB (2015)
Oxygenation Patterns of Preterm Infants in Neonatal Intensive Care

Zeo was a SuperUROP in the group. After graduating from MIT, she spent a year at Fitbit. She is now pursuing a PhD at Harvard University in medical robotics.

Max Dunitz

MEng (2016)
Predicting Hyperlactatemia in the ICU

After a brief sting in the technical consulting field, Max joined the École Doctorale de Mathématiques Hadamard​ for his doctoral studies in mathematics.

Jonathan Matthews

MEng EECS (2016)
An Embedded Device for Real-Time Noninvasive Intracranial Pressure Estimation

After graduating from MIT, Jonathan joined the MD/PhD program at the University of Chicago.

Federico Wadehn

Visiting PhD Student, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

After finishing his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Federico joined Hamilton Medical as a research engineer.

Abubakar Abid

BS and MEng EECS (2015)

After a UROP with the group, Abubakar pursued his MEng at MIT and since the graduate EE program at Stanford University.

Nicholas Kwok

Medical Student, Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program

Nicholas graduated from Harvard Medical School and is now an Intern in medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles.

Tiffany Ho

Visiting MD Student, Brown University School of Medicine 

Tiffany wrapped up her medical training at Brown University and is currently doing her residency in internal medicine.

Minoru Matsushima

Visiting Scientist
Nihon Kohden Corporation

After spending four years as a Visiting Scientist with the group, Dr. Matsushima returned to Nihon Kohden Corporation, Japan.

Caitlin Vinci

Caitlin superbly supported the group as an administrative assistant. She now holds an administrative position in the consulting industry.

Jack Hensley

MEng EECS (2018)
Characterization of Monitoring Alarms in a Community Hospital Intensive Care Unit

After graduating from MIT, Jack joined the graduate EE program at Stanford University.

Karen Brastad Evensen

Visiting PhD Student, University of Oslo

Karen returned to the University of Oslo to finish her PhD on noninvasive approaches to intracranial pressure estimation.