Workshop 6 Description:

Workshop 6: Brain Imaging
Organizers: Allen Tannenbaum, Stefano Soatto, Sylvain Bouix, and Kaleem Siddiqi

Medical imaging has been undergoing a revolution in the past decade with the advent of faster, more accurate, and cheaper imaging modalities. This powerful new hardware has driven the need for corresponding software development, which in turn has provided a major impetus for new algorithms in signal and image processing. Many of these algorithms are based on partial differential equations, curvature driven flows, geometry, and novel statistical techniques. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers from all aspects of medical imaging with the emphasis on brain imaging for a multi-disciplinary workshop in which various views may be shared, and hopefully new research directions may be opened.

A key research area is to formulate biomedical engineering principles based on a rigorous mathematical foundation in order to develop general-purpose software methods that can be integrated into complete therapy delivery systems. Such systems support the more effective delivery of many image-guided procedures--biopsy, minimally invasive surgery, and radiation therapy, among others.

Mathematical models form the basis of biomedical computing in general and medical imaging in particular. Basing those models on data extracted from images continues to be a fundamental technique for achieving scientific progress in experimental, clinical biomedical, and behavioral research. Images, acquired by a range of techniques across all biological scales, are central to understanding biological problems and their impacts on human health purely because images now encompass so many techniques beyond the visible light photographs and microscope images of biology's early years. Today, imaging is better thought of as geometrically arranged arrays of data samples measuring such diverse physical quantities as time-varying hemoglobin deoxygenation during neuronal metabolism or vector-valued measurments of water diffusion through and within tissue. The broadening scope of imaging as a way to organize our observations of the biophysical world has led to a dramatic increase in our ability to apply novel processing techniques and to combine multiple channels of data into sophisticated and complex mathematical models of physiological function and dysfunction.

The workshop will bring together a diverse group of researchers from the medical imaging community with various backgrounds including radiology, psychiatry, signal and image processing, surgery, physics, mathematics, and neurophysiology.

The workshop will focus on the following topics:

(a) Medical Imaging Modalities for Brain Imagery: MRI, fMRI, DTI, PET, SPECT, CT:

(b) Medical Imaging Processing and Computation: Registration, segmentation, visualization, computer graphics, shape theory;

(c) Mathematical Algorithms: Statistical, geometric, partial differential equations:

(d) Applications: Image guided surgery (e.g., interventional magnetics), imaging for understanding pathology (Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, OCD, clinical depression), image processing and deep brain stimulation.