Leveraging postmortem brain imaging to inform Alzheimer's disease biomarkers

Speaker: Paul A. Yushkevich

Venue: Room 414, CHOW YEI CHING BUILDING, Zijingang Campus

Abstract: Dr. Paul Yushkevich is a Professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Bioengineering Graduate Group. His research focuses on developing novel computational methodologies for biomedical image analysis, including shape representation for statistical analysis, multi-atlas and shape-based segmentation, groupwise registration, and structure-specific fMRI and diffusion MRI analysis. In his graduate work at UNC under Stephen M. Pizer, he developed the continuous medial representation (cm-rep) approach, and he has since extended this work using differential equations to solve complex geometric constraints in skeleton-based shape analysis. He has built a detailed atlas of the hippocampal region from high-field, ultra-high-resolution MRI and dense histology, and has applied his algorithms to problems in neuroimaging and cardiac imaging – earning first-place finishes in MICCAI segmentation challenges in 2012 and 2013. Dr. Yushkevich is also deeply committed to open-source software, leading the development of ITK-SNAP (a widely used interactive 3D segmentation tool with >10,000 monthly downloads) and the companion Convert3D utility. His recent work includes ex vivo 3D mapping of tau pathology in the medial temporal lobe, the ASHS software for hippocampal subfield segmentation, and deep learning-based biomarkers for early Alzheimer's disease progression.