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*** 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. ______________________________________________________________________ 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.