Maysoon Harunani
PhD Candidate, McKelvey School of Engineering/Department of Biomedical Engineering
Maysoon Harunani’s work is focused on quantifying and measuring skin color. Skin color changes can be used to diagnose diseases or monitor progression/treatment, but they are hard to detect visually in darker skin colors. In clinical trials, objective skin color measurement can be useful to confirm a diverse participant population. Subjective quantification of skin color can be inconsistent and unreliable, however, current tools for objective measurement are expensive or can be difficult to use at certain sites or situations, discouraging their widespread use. These current limitations are addressed in two ways: 1) developing computational models of skin to better understand how the different components of skin attribute to the perceived color and how it is quantified in color space and 2) developing inexpensive, easier to use, and more accurate methods to measure skin color.