Dr. Muyinatu “Bisi” Bell is an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Biomedical Engineering department. Along with a team of other researchers, she discovered an algorithm that can support photoacoustic imaging that combines ultrasound and light waves to render images on people with darker skin tones.

“When you’re imaging through skin with light, it’s kind of like the elephant in the room that there are important biases and challenges for people with darker skin compared to those with lighter skin tones […] Our work demonstrates that equitable imaging technology is possible.”

via Newsone

The discovery was part of a paper called “Mitigating skin tone bias in linear array in vivo photoacoustic imaging with short-lag spatial coherence beamforming”, co-written by Guilherme S.P. Fernandes, João H. Uliana, Luciano Bachmann, Antonio A.O. Carneiro, and Theo Z. Pavan and published in Volume 33 of Photoacoustics.