Acting Director of Undergraduate Studies in Biomedical Engineering.

My research centers on techniques for accurate analysis and quantification of medical images.

Current medical imaging modalities can reveal rich information about structure and function in three dimensions and in vivo. However, in order to extract measures that are meaningful for scientific or clinical purposes, it is necessary to have quantitative methods of medical image analysis that are robust in the presence of noise, complexity, artifacts, etc.

I am developing methods for the segmentation of anatomic object boundaries from structural images using geometric models of deformable objects.  These boundaries can then be used to measure various geometric features (e.g., curvature, volume, surface area) that may be indicative of disease.

Nonrigid registration between images of different subjects or other nonrigidly related structures is another key problem. I am working on a formulation of match measures and transformations which will enable the determination of an optimal alignment.of homologous features.  I am also interested in the analysis of diffusion tensor magnetic resonance images and functional magnetic resonance images.

I am applying these techniques primarily to the measurement of neuroanatomy and function. More accurate, reproducible, and efficient methods for measurement from images will aid in the basic understanding of physiology and in the identification of structural and functional correlates of disease.

"Shape Constraints in Deformable Models," L.H. Staib, X. Zeng, J.S. Duncan, R.T. Schultz and A. Chakraborty, In: Handbook of Medical Imaging: Processing and Analysis, I. Bankman, ed., (Academic Press, 2000), 147-157.

"Physical Model-Based Non-rigid Registration Incorporating Statistical Shape Information," Y. Wang and L.H. Staib, Medical Image Analysis, 4, 7-20 (2000).

"Boundary Finding with Prior Shape and Smoothness Models," Y. Wang and L.H. Staib, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, 22(7), 738-743 (2000).

"Automated Measurement of Latent Morphological Features in the Human Corpus Callosum," B.S. Peterson, P.A. Feineigle, L.H. Staib, J.C. Gore, Human Brain Mapping, 12(4), 232-245 (2001).