ColloquiaLeonid Zhukov's talk on Friday, April 26, 2002

[Margery Ishmael]

Friday, April 26
in Ryerson 251
at 2:30 pm

"Scientific Computing and Visualization for Biomedical Inverse Problems"

Leonid Zhukov, Ph.D.
Computer Science, Caltech

Abstract:
Biomedicine has been a focus of attention of the research community for many
years due to its potential for significant impact on human life. Only 
recently computers have become powerful enough to handle the large amount 
of data and the complexity of the computations required for today's 
biomedical problems. It is now possible for computer scientists and 
engineers to make
significant contributions by performing biologically sound, physically based
and mathematically correct simulations and quantitative predictions.  Many 
biomedical problems require reconstruction of the properties of a system 
from its measured behavior, including reconstruction of electrical, 
mechanical, structural and other properties. This class of the problems is 
known as inverse problems.

In this talk I will discuss two of my recent research projects in biomedicine:

I) Modeling the distribution of electric fields in the human brain from EEG 
data.
Electroencephalographic (EEG) recording provides the information of the
potential distribution (voltages) on the surface of the head caused by 
brain activity. Diseases like epilepsy can cause some abnormal patterns. 
The goal of the project is to use EEG information to locate the areas of 
the brain (sources) that cause seizures. Source localization is an 
ill-posed inverse problem and I will discuss regularization techniques and 
a reciprocity based FEM method I have developed to solve it.

II) Recovering structure and connectivity in a living human brain from
diffusion tensor MRI data. DT-MRI is a new modality that acquires 
information about the diffusion properties of the imaged tissue. Since 
water molecules diffuse easier along the white matter fibers in the brain 
than across, the diffusion coefficients contain the information about the 
fiber directions. The goal of the project is to use the directional 
information to 1) segment out brain structures and 2) reconstruct the major 
white matter pathways. I will present my recent
work on "oriented tensor" reconstructing techniques for recovering white 
matter fiber tracts, and the application of level set methods to model 
extraction from volumetric data.

Bio:
Leonid Zhukov is currently a senior research scientist in the Computer
Science Department at the California Institute of Technology. He received 
his B.S and M.S. in physics and engineering from Moscow Engineering and 
Physics Institute in 1993 and Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1998. 
After graduation he continued his work at the Scientific Computing and 
Imaging Institute, University of Utah. His main research interests lie 
within the fields of scientific computing, visualization and computer 
graphics. He is particularly interested in applications of computer and 
computational science to biomedicine.

Host: Prof. Rick Stevens

*The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255*
If you would like to meet the speaker, please send e-mail to 
marge at cs.uchicago.edu
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Persons who need assistance should call 773.834.8977


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Margery Ishmael
Secretary to the Chairman, Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
tel. 773.834.8977  fax. 773.702.8487
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