Title： Computational Approaches for Medical and Health Care Problems 

Speaker： Danny Ziyi Chen 

Time：2016-6-30 14:00 --- 16:00 

Venue：Seminar Room (334), Level 3, Building 5, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences 

Abstract 

Computer technology plays a vital role in modern medicine, health care, and life sciences, especially in medical imaging, human genome study, clinical diagnosis and prognosis, treatment planning and optimization, and medical data management and analysis.  As computer technology continues to evolve, computer science research and development will inevitably become an integral part of modern medicine and health care.  Computational research and applications on modeling, formulating, and solving core problems in medicine and health care are not only crucially needed, but are actually indispensable.   

In this talk, we present a set of important computational problems and approaches in modern medical research, clinical practice, and applications, with a focus on medical imaging. In particular, we discuss computational problems that arise in medical imaging, clinical diagnosis, and other medical applications.  These include identification and distribution analysis of immune cells (for the diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer, inflammation diseases, and auto-immune diseases, and in stem cell study of leukemia bone marrow micro-environments), optimal segmentation and analysis of many medical objects in 3D images (e.g., blood clots, joint structures, retinal layers, airway and vascular networks, etc), motion tracking of massive swarming bacteria in image movies, etc.  We demonstrate new models for formulating such problems as computational problems, and provide effective approaches for solving them.  Our approaches are based on machine learning (deep learning), data mining, and geometric techniques.  Further, we show experimental data and results to illustrate the clinical applications of our approaches.  Finally, we highlight some important future research trends and problems in the exciting emerging area of computational medicine and health care. 

Biography 

Dr. Danny Ziyi Chen received the B.S. degrees in Computer Science and in Mathematics from the University of San Francisco, California, USA in 1985, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA in 1988 and 1992, respectively. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA since 1992, and is currently a Professor.  Dr. Chen's main research interests are in computational biomedicine, biomedical imaging, computational geometry, algorithms and data structures, data mining, and VLSI.  He has published many journal and conference papers in these areas, and holds 5 US patents for technology development in computer science and engineering and biomedical applications. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of IEEE, and a Distinguished Scientist of ACM.  He received the CAREER Award of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1996, the James A. Burns, C.S.C. Award for Graduate Education of the University of Notre Dame in 2009, and a Laureate Award in the 2011 Computerworld Honors Program for "Arc-Modulated Radiation Therapy" for developing a new radiation cancer treatment approach.