Eric Grimson - Abstract and Bio
Abstract
On the construction and analysis of patient-specific models from medical images
Eric Grimson
Bernard Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering, Associate Department Head CS/EECS
Algorithmic methods from computer vision and machine learning are dramatically changing the practice of health care and the exploration of fundamental issues in neuroscience. By combining knowledge of expected tissue appearance, atlases of normal anatomy layout, and statistical models of shape variation, these methods can build detailed, patient-specific reconstructions of neuroanatomical structure from medical imagery. Such structural models can be automatically augmented with information about function (using fMRI), and about connectivity (using DT-MRI) to create detailed models of a patient’s anatomy. These models are routinely used for surgical planning – how to reach the target tumor with minimal damage to nearby critical structures; and for surgical navigation – guiding the surgeon to the target site rapidly and safely.
By combining with statistical models of population variation, these methods can also be used to investigate basic neuroscience questions – how different are the shapes of structures between normal subjects and patients with a specific disease (such as schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s); how do these shapes change with development in children, or with administration of pharmaceuticals; how do physiological properties differ between populations (such as the local structure of fiber orientation in white matter tracts). These computational methods provide a toolkit for exploring the structure and connectivity of neuroanatomical structures, in normal subjects and in diseased patients.
Bio: Eric Grimson
Professor Eric Grimson is the Bernard Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Head of its Computer Vision Group. He also holds a joint appointment as a Lecturer in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women's Hospital.
He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Regina in 1975 and was awarded a Doctorate in Mathematics from MIT in 1980.
Professor Grimson is currently the Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Previously, he served as Associate Department Head for Computer Science, as well as Education Officer for the department.
Professor Grimson is a Fellow of the IEEE and of AAAI, and a recipient of the Bose Award for Undergraduate Teaching at MIT.
Professor Grimson's research interests include computer vision and medical image analysis. Since 1975, he and his research group have pioneered state of the art methods for activity and behavior recognition, object and person recognition, image database indexing, site modeling, stereo vision, and many other areas of computer vision. Since the early 1990s, his group has been applying vision techniques in medicine for image-guided surgery, disease analysis, and computational anatomy.
