Diffusion Tensor Analysis, Tracking, and Visualization

Dr. Carl-Fredrik Westin

This project is a collaboration between Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing and Dr. Carl-Fredrik Westin, Director of the Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging (LMI) at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Westin's research interests are focused on medical applications of image analysis. He is currently working on analysis of Diffusion Tensor MRI data, and automated segmentation and registration of data from MRI, CT, and Ultrasound, using multidimensional signal processing techniques.

The purpose of this collaboration is to advance a standard method of diffusion tensor image analysis, fiber tracking, by performing clustering of fiber tracts and computing statistics on fibers within and between scans. The biomedical focus of this project will be to better understand and quantify the impact of schizophrenia on white matter architecture.

Dr. Carl-Fredrik Westin received the MSc degree in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering in 1988 from Linkoping University. He joined the Computer Vision Laboratory the same year where he did research on color, information representation, image flow, frequency estimation, filtering of uncertain and irregularly sampled data and tensor operators in image analysis. In 1991, Dr. Westin was awarded the SAAB-SCANIA prize for his work in field of Computer Vision. He received the Lic.Techn. degree on the topic feature extraction from a tensor image descriptions, in 1991. In 1994 Westin, graduated as a PhD in computer vision, also from Linkoping University. His thesis "A tensor framework for multidimensional signal processing" presents a novel method for filtering uncertain and irregularly sampled data termed normalized convolution. He joined Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 1996. He is presently an Assistant Professor of Radiology, in the Radiology Department at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging (LMI) at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Additionally, he has a joint appointment with the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, MA. Dr. Westin is the Core PI responsible for the DT-MRI core of the Neuroimaging Analysis Center (NAC).

Dr. Gordon Kindlmann is a post-doctoral Research Fellow in the LMI, having received his PhD from the University of Utah, under Dr. Chris Johnson of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. His methods for tensor visualization have been adopted in the DT-MRI community, and include deflection-based tractography, barycentric description of tensor shape, and superquadric tensor glyphs. He is currently working under Dr. Carl-Fredrik Westin on developing novel methods for quantifying and visualization clinically relevant parameters of diffusion-weighted images.