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Sina Farsiu

Anderson-Rupp Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Box 3802 Med Ctr, Durham, NC 27710
CIEMAS 2575, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


I am the director of the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Laboratory. Along with my colleagues, we investigate how to improve early diagnostic methods and find new imaging biomarkers of ocular and neurological diseases in adults (e.g. age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, Glaucoma, Alzheimer) and children (e.g. retinopathy or prematurity). We also develop automatic artificial intelligence machine learning and deep learning algorithms to detect/segment/quantify anatomical/pathological structures seen on medical images.

On another front, we study efficient signal processing based methods to overcome the theoretical and practical limitations that constrain the achievable resolution of any imaging device. Our approach, which is based on adaptive extraction and robust fusion of relevant information from the expensive and sophisticated as well as simple and cheap sensors, has found wide applications in improving the quality of imaging systems such as ophthalmic SD-OCT, digital X-ray mammography, electronic and optical microscopes, and commercial digital camcorders. We are also interested in pursuing statistical signal processing based projects, including super-resolution, demosaicing, deblurring, denoising, motion estimation, compressive sensing/adaptive sampling, and sensor fusion.

Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations


Anderson-Rupp Professor of Biomedical Engineering · 2023 - Present Biomedical Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering
Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering · 2021 - Present Biomedical Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering
Professor in Computer Science · 2021 - Present Computer Science, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering · 2022 - Present Pierre R. Lamond Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering
Faculty Network Member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences · 2012 - Present Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, University Institutes and Centers

Recent News Items


Published November 2, 2025
Preserving Sight With a Gene Therapy Implant
Published March 1, 2019
AI Technique Opens Door for Accelerated Progress in Neuroscience Research
Published November 20, 2018
A smartphone and new software could help save infants born preterm

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Recent Scholarly Works


Very Preterm Infant Retinal Microanatomy at 36 Weeks' Postmenstrual Age and 2-Year Neurodevelopment.

Journal article JAMA Ophthalmol · June 4, 2026 IMPORTANCE: If noninvasive optical coherence tomography (OCT) retinal imaging could predict 2-year neurodevelopment of very preterm (VPT; <32 weeks' gestational age) infants in neonatal intensive care, it might help to guide management. OBJECTIVE: To evalu ... Full text Link to item Cite

Corneal Innervation Research at a Crossroads: A Tool-Driven Roadmap for the Future.

Journal article Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci · June 1, 2026 Corneal innervation research has faced long-standing clinical challenges that only recent technological breakthroughs now make tractable. Advances in single-cell analysis, viral vectors, clinical imaging, and artificial intelligence provide integrated appr ... Full text Link to item Cite

Spatial Coherence Loss: All Objects Matter in Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection.

Journal article Pattern recognition · May 2026 Generic object detection is a category-independent task that relies on accurate modeling of objectness. We show that for accurate semantic analysis, the network needs to learn all object-level predictions that appear at any stage of learning, including the ... Full text Cite
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Recent Grants


Duke Ophthalmology Mentored Physician Scientist Program

Inst. Training Prgm or CMEMentor · Awarded by National Institutes of Health · 2026 - 2031

Defining the underlying causes of retinal degeneration in CRB1 disease

ResearchCo-Principal Investigator · Awarded by Foundation Fighting Blindness, Inc · 2024 - 2029

Quantitative assessment of glaucomatous conventional outflow dynamics

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Eye Institute · 2019 - 2029

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Education


University of California, Santa Cruz · 2005 Ph.D.
University of Tehran (Iran) · 2001 M.S.
Sharif University of Technology (Iran) · 1999 B.S.