Fyrirlestur á vegum rafmagns- og tölvuverkfræðideildar HÍ og IEEE á Íslandi
An optimized Image Analysis Pipeline for Pediatric Brain Dysmorphology
Lotta M. Ellingsen Ph.D,
Lektor, Rafmagns- og tölvuverkfræðideild HÍ og gestalektor
(Visiting Associate Professor) við Johns Hopkins háskóla.
Abstract
Intellectual disability is common in the population (2% of school-aged children), yet most of the individual genetic causes have not been identified. The recent availability of whole exome sequencing has led to the identification of genetic etiology in a number of Mendelian disorders, all of which have distinctive phenotypic features. Only a small minority of children with intellectual disability have distinctive gross neuro-radiological abnormalities, making the identification of groups of patients amenable for genetic sequencing difficult. In my talk I will present our recent work on constructing an image analysis pipeline comprising state of the art algorithms to evaluate subtle brain morphological abnormalities in children. Our pipeline will be specifically developed and tested on pediatric data. Although most individuals with intellectual disability have an MRI performed early in life, such pediatric imaging is challenging for analysis since all of the most frequently used methodologies have been developed for adult brains. During my talk I will describe these current state of the art methodologies for quantifying morphological differences in individuals and explain some of the obvious challenges seen in pediatric MRI datasets. I will discuss our approaches to robustly characterize such a pipeline, as well as potential uses of such a pipeline for biological discovery which will be used to quantify and characterize subtle anatomical differences in patients with a specific genetic etiology (Kabuki syndrome) as well as individuals with intellectual disability of unknown etiology.
Biography
Lotta M. Ellingsen received the B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Iceland in 2001. From 2001-2002 she held a position at deCode Genetics in Iceland, where she worked on signal processing algorithms for automatic genotyping. From 2002-2008 she held both teaching and research assistantships at the Johns Hopkins University, where she conducted research in 3D-3D deformable image registration for the human brain and pelvis under the supervision of Prof. Jerry Prince, in the Image Analysis and Communications Laboratory (http://www.iacl.ece.jhu.edu/Prince). She received MSc and Ph.D. degrees in 2004 and 2008, respectively, from the Johns Hopkins University, both in electrical and computer engineering. During her studies she received several awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship (2002) and a Thor Thors Fellowship form the American-Scandinavian Foundation (2003). She also received a full departmental tuition fellowship from the Johns Hopkins University from 2002-2007. After finishing her Ph.D. she did a one year post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins in the Image Analysis and Communications Laboratory.