SHORT BIO

Daphne is a PhD candidate at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), under the supervision of Prof. Konstantina Nikita and a fellow at the Archimedes Research Unit, collaborating with Maria Vakalopoulou’s team. She holds an MEng degree from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NTUA and an MSc in Bioinformatics and Biomedical Data Science from the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). 

 

Before starting her PhD, she worked as a Machine Learning Engineer, focusing on designing and building ETL pipelines. She also completed a 10-month research internship at the Archimedes Research Unit, where she worked on computational pathology and medical vision foundation models.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Daphne's research interests lie in Artificial Intelligence, particularly deep learning applications in biomedicine. Her current work focuses on developing novel computer vision methods for histopathology image analysis, with the goal of extracting valuable insights into cancer and improving model generalization.

PhD research on "VLMs for Medical Imaging"
Abstract: The application and adaptation of recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for stroke risk stratification is examined, using carotid ultrasound data from patients with atherosclerosis and specialized prompts. During zero-shot evaluation, 3 out of 6 models recognized the imaging modality and anatomy but provided incorrect risk assessment. Adaptation with additional clinical data significantly improved performance, suggesting potential future clinical use.