***[Apologies for Multiple Posting]***

Seminar Information:

11:00 AM, Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Room 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building


Fuhui Long, PhD
Staff Scientist, Janelia Farm Research Campus
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, VA




Towards High-throughput Phenotyping of Biological Systems:
What can bioimage informatics and data mining do for biology


With the advances of fluorescent labeling and bioimaging techniques,
biologists can now light up specific proteins in targeted cells or
tissues, and acquire 3D+ high-resolution images of an organism both in
vitro and in vivo. Such images contain a rich body of phenotype
information, including the morphology, anatomy, function, and
development of the organisms. In this talk, I will show how bioimage
informatics and data mining techniques can help extract phenotype
information in an automatic, quantitative, and high-throughput way,
and thus turn images into biological knowledge. I will take C.
elegans, fruitfly, and human as example systems. Particularly, I will
first show how to build digital atlases of model organisms and use
them in high-throughput screening of gene expression at the single
cell resolution. I will also show how such an analysis can help us
gain new insight into the relationships among gene expression, cell
fate, and cell lineage in C. elegans. I will then discuss how bioimage
informatics techniques can help us reverse engineer a fly’s brain.
After that, I will give some examples on human cancer classification
and prediction. I will also introduce the high-performance image
computing platform, V3D, we have developed that incorporates a variety
of bioimage informatics functions including segmentation,
registration, modeling, pattern comparison, annotation, and
visualization. I will conclude with future research directions.
________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Fuhui Long is a staff scientist at Janelia Farm Research Campus,
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, working with Dr. Eugene Myers. Her
research interest has been focusing on developing efficient bioimage
analysis, computer vision, pattern recognition, and data mining
techniques to attack challenging problems in neuroscience and
molecular biology. Before joining Janelia Farm Research Campus, she
was with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Duke University Medical
Center. Her doctorate is from the Institute of Artificial Intelligence
and Robotics from the Xi'an Jiaotong University in 1998. She helped
organize several bioimage informatics workshops in the past several
years, and is co-organizing the conference “Turning Images to
Knowledge: Large-Scale 3D Image Annotation, Management, and
Visualization” that will be held this May. Dr. Long is co-supervising
postdocs and junior staff scientists in the Myers Lab.




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Assistant Professor
Computer Science
George Mason University
http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~hrangwal