VIEW AN ABSTRACT

Quantitative medical imaging, once only common in biomedical research, is increasingly accepted and expected in personalized clinical care. Quantitative coronary angiography, quantification of cardiac function, and routine clinical use of many other quantitative functional indices pioneered many aspects of precision medicine in routine cardiology patient management.

The presentation will focus on quantitative 3D and 4D analysis of coronary IVUS and OCT, aortic CT and MR, left- and right-ventricular MR, and transthoracic ultrasound. After a brief introduction of fundamental image processing approaches leading to determination of clinically relevant quantitative indices of cardiovascular morphology and function, the talk will focus on several translational medicine tasks with direct clinical applicability.

The talk will discuss use of quantitative coronary IVUS and OCT for plaque cap thickness measurement, assessment of plaque vulnerability via TCFA determination, prediction of at-risk plaque development, prediction of diffuse disease in transplant patients, and associations between coronary and retinal indices of cardiovascular health. Aortic morphology, function, distensibility, and motion can be assessed via CT and MR imaging followed by 3D/4D segmentation of the aortic wall, with applications to atherosclerotic disease, connective tissue disorders, aortic aneurysms, etc. Cardiac function can be quantified, e.g., from 2D+time or 3D+time transthoracic echo or MR imaging – the applicability of highly automated image analysis techniques will be demonstrated. For all presented quantitative cardiovascular imaging tasks, developed methods will be shown on clinically-relevant images and achieved results presented.

Brief Bio:
Milan Sonka received his Ph.D. degree in 1983 from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Research of the College of Engineering at the University of Iowa, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, and Radiation Oncology, Co-director of the Iowa Institute for Biomedical Imaging, IEEE Fellow, AIMBE Fellow, and MICCAI Fellow. His research interests include medical imaging and knowledge-based image analysis with emphasis on cardiovascular, pulmonary, orthopedic, cancer, and ophthalmic image analysis. He is the first author of 4 editions of Image Processing, Analysis and Machine Vision book (1993, 1998, 2008, 2015) and co-authored or co-edited 20 books/proceedings. He has published more than 150 journal papers and over 350 other publications. He is past Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging and member of the Editorial Board of the Medical Image Analysis journal. To bring results of his research work to clinical practice, he has co-founded two medical imaging companies -- Medical Imaging Applications LLC, and VIDA Diagnostics Inc.