The Future of Biomedical Image Analysis

Abstract

The future of biomedical image analysis is no longer in anatomical imaging but in imaging of pathways and mechanisms at the cellular level and below. In this talk I present seven years of development of image analysis techniques for rolling leukocytes observed in vivo. Rolling leukocytes are activated white blood cells. The motion, shape, flux, number and position of these cells are important indicators of the inflammatory process. Measuring image-derived parameters are vital to validating anti-inflammatory drugs and to understanding the basic mechanism of inflammatory diseases such as atherosclerosis and arthritis. To date, these image features are typically derived manually due to the difficulty associated with intravital image clutter, noise, occlusion, instability, poor contrast, contrast changes and shape deformation.

First, I will discuss diffusion-based image enhancement methods appropriate to improve these types of images, automated registration techniques that allow leukocyte detection and tracking in a moving field of view. The second portion of the talk focuses on novel cell detection methods for intravital microscopy. The methods include a level set solution, the gradient inverse coefficient of variation (GICOV) technique, and the more recent Poisson inverse gradient approach. The third part of the talk details tracking methods used for rolling leukocytes. These are divided into two categories: active contour approaches and particle filter approaches. For both detection and tracking, real video data examples show the efficacy of the developed techniques.

New directions in cellular image analysis are discussed including high content screening, collaborative hardware-software co-design, and future work in image analysis for systems biology.

Speaker Biography

Scott Acton is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. degree at Virginia Tech.

Scott's laboratory at UVA is called VIVA - Virginia Image and Video Analysis. They specialize in image analysis problems. Most work in VIVA is biomedically oriented and funded by the National Institutes of Health. Scott has over 200 publications in the image analysis area including the recent book Biomedical Image Analysis: Tracking.

Scott has been at the University of Virginia since 2000. Before that time, he worked in the academic world for Oklahoma State University and in the engineering world for AT&T, Motorola and the Mitre Corporation. When Scott is not being an engineer, he plays basketball (poorly) and golf (even worse) and attempts to write fiction. He and his wife have two boys (ages three and five). This year, he is spending his sabbatical in Santa Fe, New Mexico USA.