The goal of the UNC CASILab is to bring together clinicans, basic scientists, theoreticians, and engineers to develop new methods of medical image analysis and computer-assisted surgery. The group is led by Dr. Elizabeth Bullitt. Collaborating Departments within UNC include Biostatistics, Computer Science, Genetics, Radiation Oncology, Radiology, Surgery, and Statistics. CASILab is also actively collaborating with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, Mass), the University of Utah, Duke University, and KU Leuven, Belgium.
US governmental support for the laboratory's research has come from NIH-NCI, NIH-HLB, and NIH-NIBIB.
Two patents have issued and one is pending. We have past and/or ongoing relationships with Medtronic Corp. (Minn, Minn), R2 Technologies (Alta Vista, CA), W.L. Gore Inc (Flagstaff, AZ) and Kitware (Rochester, NY).
A major research focus has been upon the automated definition of connected vessel trees from 3D image data. A second focus has been automated brain tumor segmentation. A third focus has been image-guided surgery, both open and endovascular. A particularly exciting area, arising from a combination of the tumor and vessel work, is the statistical analysis of vessel "attributes" for assessment of disease. We believe that this approach may provide a valuable means of determining tumor malignancy and of response to treatment non-invasively. Important related projects include development of better methods of image registration and of atlas formation. We have also collected high resolution, multi-modal, 3T MR images of 100 healthy subjects, equally divided by sex and with 20 subjects per decade, that are now publicly available to the scientific community. Work on cancer-associated vasculature has recently been extended to genetically engineered mouse models. Other projects are also in progress.
Please see the Recognition section for information about awards to CASILab's members and students and for other forms of recognition of CASILab projects and papers. General information about UNC medical image research is available through the UNC Medical Image Display and Analysis Group.
CASILab Research Projects
Vessel segmentation/graph description
Healthy image database for assessment of disease/aging
Quantitative analysis of tumor vasculature
Registration and atlas formation
Genetically engineered mouse tumor/vessel imaging
3D image-guided endovascular surgery
CASILAB HIGHLIGHTS 2006-2007
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RESEARCH
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Brad Davis wins 2007 Marr Prize at ICCV! The Marr Prize is one of the highest recognitions in the field of image analysis/computer vision. Brad won this award for the paper Davis B, Fletcher PT, Bullitt E, Joshi S (2007) Population Shape Regression from Random Design Data.
Healthy Image Database is Publicly Available as of Dec 2007:Our standardized image database of 100 healthy subjects imaged at 3T using T1, T2, DTI, and MRA imaging is now publicly available for download from the MIDAS Data Server at Kitware, Inc at http://hdl.handle.net/1926/594
Cover Article Radiology Dec 2007: The paper Bullitt E, Lin NU, Smith JK, Zeng D, Winer EP, Carey LA, Lin W, Ewend MG (2007) Blood Vessel Morphological Changes as Visualized by MRA During Treatment of Brain Metastases. Radiology 245:824-830 was published as the cover article for the December 2007 issue of Radiology.
Herbert M. Stauffer Award 2006: The Herbert M. Stauffer Award is awarded annually by the Association of University Radiologists. The winner for 2006 was the paper Bullitt E, Zeng D, Gerig G, Aylward S, Joshi S, Smith JK, Lin W, Ewend MG (2005) Vessel tortuosity and brain tumor malignancy: A blinded study. Academic Radiology 12:1232-1240.
RSNA slides (RSNA 2006-2007) These slides were presented at a Continuing Medical Education Course at RSNA 2006 and 2007. If you link to any scientific image or if use some or part of the scientific slides in your own work, please attribute the work to the appropriate published paper and to this website <Download slides>.
