Health Informatics Seminar

When: Wednesday, October 3, 2018 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Where: Health Sciences Library, room 227, UNC-Chapel Hill (335 S. Columbia Street)

Presentation Title: Pixels to Diagnosis: How to Design, Develop and Evaluate a Medical Image Analysis System

Speaker: Metin N. Gurcan, PhD (presented from Duke)

Metin Gurcan, PhD is Director of Center for Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Internal Medicine, Pathology and Biomedical Engineering at Wake Forest School of Medicine and Director of the Clinical Image Analysis Lab (http://tsi.wakehealth.edu/CIALab/). Dr. Gurcan received his BSc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey and his MSc. Degree in Digital Systems Engineering from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, England. From 1999 to 2001, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Radiology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Following his postdoctoral work, he worked as a senior researcher and a product director at a high-tech company, specializing in computer-aided detection and diagnosis of cancer from radiological images. Previously, he was Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Pathology, Director of Division of Clinical and Translational Informatics at the Ohio State University.

Dr. Gurcan is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and was awarded three patents for his inventions in medical image analysis. He is the recipient of several awards including the British Foreign and Commonwealth Organization Award, NCI caBIG Embodying the Vision Award, NIH Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (EUREKA) Award, Children’s Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, The OSU Cancer Center REAP Award, and Pelotonia Idea Award. As an internationally recognized researcher and educator, he is a senior of member of IEEE, SPIE, and AMIA. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Pathology Informatics and Journal of Medical Imaging; and organizes the Pathology Informatics Histopathological Image Analysis (HIMA) workshop.

Seminar Abstract: 

Increased interest in medical imaging has resulted in development of a variety of image analysis systems. Many of these systems follow the ‘computer-aided diagnosis’ paradigm. In this paradigm, the main function of the image analysis system is to help medical professionals (e.g. radiologists, pathologists, dermatologists) in their decision-making, instead of making decisions on their behalf. If a system is designed to help medical professionals, its logic, development methodology and evaluation should make sense to the medical professionals who use them.

In this talk, we will describe how to develop an image analysis system, its modular blocks, how to translate medical knowledge into algorithms, how to supplement this knowledge with pattern recognition methods, and how to evaluate them with carefully designed reader studies in which medical professionals with varying levels of experience participate as readers.

For a complete seminar schedule, visit the CHIP website.