Maxina Sheft

Maxina Sheft is a graduate student in medical engineering and medical physics merging photonics with signal processing for real-time tissue visualization during neurosurgery. She develops polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) systems for intraoperative guidance in deep brain stimulation procedures. Current surgical imaging lacks the micron-scale resolution needed for optimal targeting accuracy. To address this gap, Maxina designs optical probes and computational frameworks to visualize brain tissue microstructure in real time. She develops physics-based signal processing methods for extracting polarization states from high-dimensional PS-OCT data, leveraging matrix transformations to robustly recover tissue optical properties. She integrates image processing and multimodal registration algorithms to align intraoperative PS-OCT with preoperative MRI scans for surgical guidance. As a MathWorks Fellow, Maxina will expand automated image analysis pipelines to systematically validate PS-OCT across clinical tissue types. Her efforts could help make optical coherence tomography a practical tool for guiding neurosurgery.