Title: Image Synthesis and its Applications in Medical Image Analysis

Speaker: Prof. Jerry L. Prince, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Chair: Prof. Tianzi Jiang, Brainnetome Center, CASIA

Time: 10:00-11:00, Nov. 9, 2017

Venue: The 1st meeting room, 3rd floor of the Intelligence Building

[Abstract]

Image synthesis methods can take acquired images and produce images with a contrast or modality that was not imaged. While not yet trusted for clinical use, these methods are starting to prove invaluable in medical image analysis. For example, in PET-MR scanners, CT images are synthesized from the acquired MR images and used for attenuation correction in PET reconstruction. Synthesized images can be used to replace missing contrasts in standard algorithms pipelines images were not acquired or were corrupted by noise or artifacts. Image synthesis can be used to normalize image intensities in MR images, which lack a standard intensity scale.

This can be very useful in multi-center trials involving scanners from different manufacturers, hardware, and pulse sequence implementations. Image synthesis can be used to improve multi-modal registration by synthesizing images so that same-modality similarity metrics can be used instead of mutual information. Image synthesis can also be used to improve resolution--i.e., to provide super-resolution. Finally, image synthesis can be used to normalize longitudinal image acquisitions that were acquired over time and have data acquired with different resolutions, pulse sequences, and even scanner strengths. Different image synthesis approaches will be described, starting from a historical perspective and ending with the most modern approaches that are under development today. Different applications will be described and demonstrated to illustrate the great utility and potential of these methods.

[Biography]

Jerry L. Prince received the B.S. degree from the University of Connecticut in 1979 and the S.M., E.E., and Ph.D. degrees in 1982, 1986, and 1988, respectively, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, MIT Lincoln Laboratories, and The Analytic Sciences Corporation (TASC). He joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University in 1989, where he is currently William B. Kouwenhoven Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and holds joint appointments in the Departments of Radiology, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics and Statistics. Dr. Prince is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the MICCAI Society, Fellow of the AIMBE, and a member of Sigma Xi. He also holds memberships in Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing from 1992-1995, an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging from 2000-2004 and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Medical Image Analysis. Dr. Prince received a 1993 National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellows Award, was Maryland's 1997 Outstanding Young Engineer, and was awarded the MICCAI Society Enduring Impact Award in 2012. He is also co-founder of Sonavex, Inc. His current research interests are in image processing and computer vision with primary application to medical imaging; he has published over 300 articles and abstracts on these subjects.