Focus on Faculty: CSE Faculty Presentations

Imaging the Body and Disease - A Perspective for the Computer Scientist

Raghu Machiraju
Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering
The Ohio State University

Jun 2 2009 3:30PM
480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are welcome.
Refreshments will be served prior to the talk.

Abstract:
In this talk, I will describe inter-disciplinary work that my graduate research colleagues and I have been conducting with biologist and scientists over the last few years. I will focus mostly on the computational and algorithmic challenges required to capture the full architectural details of the micro environment of tumors in complex mammalian organisms. The ultimate goal is to be able to demonstrate phenotypical differences through a variety of algorithms. Some of the challenges arise from the difficulty of imaging thick tissue sections with optical microscopes, other arise from the ill-posed nature of the problem. The presentation will describe the reconstruction of structures at the cellular scale in the mammalian breast tissue. Later to provide a broader perspective, I will briefly describe other work that captures function (fMRI) and structure (white matter tracts) of the human brain (Diffusion Tensor Imaging). In addition to describing methods and algorithms, I will also describe some of the cultural and logistical issues I faced during the course of this work.

Bio:
Raghu Machiraju is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at The Ohio State University. He also holds appointments in the Program of Tumor Microenvironment (TME), OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center, BioMedical Informatics, and at the Wright Center for Innovation (WCI). His research interests include scientific and biomedical visualization and image analysis. The work on cellular reconstruction was conducted in collaboration with Drs. Gustavo Leone and Michael Ostrowski of the TME Program.

Host: Dong Xuan