Raluca-Maria Sandu

My research interests lie in the real-world application of machine and deep learning methods for image and language tasks. I currently work in Zurich, Switzerland as a Machine Learning Engineer at Accenture.
I have graduated with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Bern, where my thesis topic was analysis of medical images for improving liver cancer treatments. You can find more information about my PhD topic in one of my publications. My PhD research has been integrated into a clinical commercial product at a Swiss medical device company.
I like to spend time outdoors doing sports like surfing, skiing, snowboarding, or SUP. Additionally, I enjoy reading books of all sorts, here is my Goodreads profile. Animals, bird watching, and teaching new tricks to my two beautiful orange cats also bring me a lot of joy. My blogposts are single-handedly researched and written by me (hence the spelling mistakes).
Python PyTorch Machine Learning Deep Learning Computer Vision Medical Imaging Diffusion Models AWS Generative AI Project Management

Recent Blogposts

Segmentation of Fine Facial Wrinkles with U-Net

Segmenting wrinkles is still unsolved task with many applications

Posted on April 18, 2025
Table of Contents Introduction What are fine facial wrinkles and why are these so hard to classify? Model architecture Dataset Preparation and Augmentation Evaluating an imbalanced datase... Read More
segmentation machine learning ai deep learning Unet

Generative AI Image Tools in Marketing and Design: Opportunities & Challenges

GenAI software & tools in image generation & editing for (mostly) non-technical users.

Posted on August 19, 2024
This post has been written as part of my work at Accenture and can be found on LinkedIn as well. This blog post represents my personal views and subjective experience with these tools. I ... Read More
GenAI Midjourney Adobe Firefly Flux Stable Diffusion

Fine-tuning with Stable Diffusion XL

Fine-tuning your own images with Stable Diffusion XL - Just another project with my cats

Posted on June 15, 2024
Late to the party as usual, I finally got around fine-tuning my own images with Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 on a free-tier Google Colab using LoRA. Despite many tutorials being available so f... Read More
stable diffusion genai gradio sdxl midjourney sd3 finetuning python google colab

Prompts, tips, tricks for photography with Midjourney

Creating incredibly realistic photos with Midjourney

Posted on April 04, 2024
To be honest, I was never interested in trying Midjourney - sure you can create cool pics, but what could I use them for? After all, I live in a small apartment, and our walls are already... Read More
genai midjourney photos dalle
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