About Us
Our core work, which will remain at the center of IPAG's efforts in the years to come, uses organ and tissue-level diagnostic medical images in segmenting and measuring structure and function, image registration, and tracking and quantifying motion and deformation. Continuing to explore how our approaches can be integrated or economized is always at the forefront of our thinking. For example, how can image intensity and image-derived feature information be combined to develop more robust segmentation and registration algorithms or how can parameters found at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., strain in an infarcted region of the left ventricle) be used to guide the extraction of useful low level image features?
However, we also expect to be drawn in new and exciting directions based on our exposure to emerging collaborations with our colleagues in MR spectroscopy and physics, different clinical areas related to image-guided intervention, and structural and functional imaging at the cellular and molecular level. While we will be able to dovetail some of these efforts with methodological approaches we are already developing, we expect to be drawn to entirely new directions. These include tracking multiple nonrigid moving objects with complex evolving relationships (e.g., cell body motion and tubule growth), estimating statistical mixtures of biochemical information represented at each voxel in a variety of image datasets attempting to probe biologically meaningful information (e.g., MR spectroscopy, molecular imaging using fluorescent and/or radiolabeled probes), and designing close-to-real-time updating strategies regarding tissue and tool movement in interventional procedures.