HEMANTH KONGARA

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January, 2022

Visual Explanation for Abnormality Prediction in OCT Images

Research Scholar | IISc – Spectrum Lab (with Carl Zeiss)

Designed CNN-based medical imaging pipelines with advanced denoising Applied Grad-CAM, Score-CAM, Ablation-CAM for explainable AI Publications and presentations at NeurIPS Workshops and MDPI Journals Research focused on XAI, medical image analysis, and robustness

Publication Details
April 2022

Deep-Learning-Based Visualization and Volumetric Analysis of Fluid Regions in Optical Coherence Tomography Scans
Using deep learning

This work presents a deep-learning-based framework for visualizing and estimating retinal fluid volumes in OCT scans across IRF, SRF, and PED pathologies. Using Inception-ResNet-based models and a robust Ensemble-CAM visualization approach, the method enables interpretable localization and accurate volumetric analysis validated against expert annotations.


Dec 2025

Production-Grade Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering (RAG) System

Built an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline for document-grounded question answering using SQuAD v2 as a benchmark. Designed a structure-aware chunking strategy with controlled overlap, indexed document chunks in Chroma using MiniLM bi-encoder embeddings, and evaluated retrieval quality using Recall@K based on gold answer spans. Enhanced precision by introducing a cross-encoder reranker to re-score candidate passages, significantly improving fact-level retrieval accuracy. The system mirrors industry-standard search pipelines by separating fast candidate recall from high-precision relevance ranking.