Dr. Ramona Leenings

As a software developer at heart, Ramona has pursued her passion for elegantly coded smart software systems throughout her career. She is a trained software developer through apprenticeship, receiving education from Klaus Löffelmann, author of several software engineering books and senior software engineer at Microsoft. Additionally, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Business and Computer Science from the University of Applied Sciences in Münster and has specialized in Cognitive Science with a master’s degree at the University of Osnabrück, focusing on Artificial Intelligence, Neuroinformatics, and Robotics.

Ramona loves to develop algorithmic solutions for complex automation tasks and clean and usable software frameworks. In her PhD for advanced research in medical sciences (The German Dr.rer.medic), she has conceptualized a machine learning framework called photon-ai.com that abstracts and condenses machine learning analyses to the most important design decisions, so that it can be applied from practitioners in medicine and the Life Sciences.

Currently, she is finalizing her doctoral degree in computer science, where she uses deep learning architectures and latent space analysis to detect subtle patterns of major depressive disorder (MDD) in structural MRI scans (unofficial subtitle: trying to find the needle in the haystack).

In addition, Ramona is exploiting her accumulated experience in finding difficult patterns in noisy data to automate bowel wall segmentation in ultrasound of patients with ulcerating colitis. Since patients with ulcerating colitis typically experience different phases of symptom relapse and symptom remission in the course of their illness, the disease activity must be closely monitored to adjust therapeutic means. In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Andreas Lügering, they are working on offering ultrasound as a scalable alternative to invasive methods such as colonoscopy.