*** Apologies for multiple posting ****
When: 10 AM, Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Where: Room 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building

Who: Colin Studholme, PhD

Associate Professor, Radiology and Biomedical Imaging

University of California, San Francisco


Title: Imaging and Quantifying Human Fetal Brain Growth In Utero


Abstract: Understanding how the normal human brain develops in utero
is a key area of interest in research areas ranging from basic
neuroscience to clinical radiology. This talk will describe the work
carried out in our group to develop techniques that allow the
formation and analysis of high resolution 3D MR images of the
unsedated human fetal brain in utero.

Approaches to fetal motion correction and image reconstruction will
first be reviewed. These techniques allow the formation of a
geometrically correct high resolution 3D MR image by combining
multiple motion corrupted clinical 2D acquisitions. These 3D images
provide a dramatic new insight into the developing human brain in both
normal and abnormal growth, but pose new challenges for automated
analysis techniques. Methods for automated atlas based segmentation of
both transient and developed tissue structures will be described.
These provide accurate tissue maps that form the basis for a range of
computational anatomy tools that can be used to reveal the patterns of
growth underlying the formation of the human brain. Preliminary
results of studies of normal brain growth patterns between the ages of
20 and 27 weeks will be presented in terms of regional tissue volume,
deformation tensor morphometry, laminar thickness and surface folding.
These methods reveal critical phases of tissue growth and also detect
subtle new focal differences related to abnormalities which are of
important clinical use. Preliminary results show the promise of these
new techniques in providing, for the first time, accurate quantitative
maps of early human brain growth in utero.

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Bio: Dr. Studholme completed a PhD in Medical Physics and Biophysics
at the University of London in 1997 in measures of medical image
alignment. His postdoctoral work in non-rigid medical image
registration was carried out at Yale University where he was awarded a
Yale Medical School Postdoctoral Fellowship in Medical Sciences to
support his work on incorporating imaging physics into relative MRI
distortion correction. He moved as faculty to the University of
California San Francisco in 2000 where he is currently Associate
Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, and leads the
biomedical image computing group. He is a senior member of the IEEE
and has been an NIH funded principal investigator since 2002. He has
authored or co-authored over 55 international journal articles on
medical image analysis.