Dr. Joe Greer of the Good Health Institute sponsored Herff students at the 2026 Senior Design Expo

(Pictured: Team Five Guys and a diagram explaining the device they created.) 

The Herff College of Engineering is extremely grateful to all of the industry partners who sponsored students' 2026 Senior Design projects. The nine-month assignments serve as the capstone projects for Herff's engineering students and allow students to work hand-in-hand with industries. 

Dr. Joe Greer of the Good Health Institute sponsored Team Five Guys, who developed an AI lesion identification system. Medical and dental practitioners often encounter oral lesions that are difficult to identify during routine examinations. Some lesions are small or visually subtle, which increases the risk of delayed diagnosis and treatment. Team Five Guys' project addresses the need for a rapid decision-support tool that assists practitioners in identifying oral lesions from clinical images. 

The objective is to develop an artificial intelligence-based lesion recognition system that analyzes an oral image and returns the three most likely lesion categories to support differential diagnosis. The proposed approach uses a fine-tuned machine learning model trained on a curated dataset of oral lesion images. The model processes the image and optional descriptive parameters provided by the practitioner. A locally deployed system running on a workstation in the dental office performs the analysis. This architecture reduces network dependence, protects patient data, and enables fast inference. 

"In their approach to this problem, Team Five Guys demonstrated critical thinking skills that rival those of their peers already in industry," said Dr. Aaron Robinson, who served as faculty advisor to Team Five Guys. "I don't think it can be emphasized enough how valuable it is for these students to go through the process of first identifying a problem, deconstruct it, and find a creative solution that actually works. Our students aren't just making Herff a better college. They're uplifting our entire community." 

Thank you, Dr. Joe Greer and the Good Health Institute!