Abstract:

  A global effort is underway in the twenty-first century to reverse engineer the brain. Scott Acton will highlight image processing and analysis work in neuroscience that is supporting this effort. The scientific community is attempting to map the structure and connectivity of neurons in organisms such as Drosophila – the fruit fly. To accomplish such an atlas, automated image analysis is required and stands as a major roadblock to success. The talk addresses recent progress in the segmentation and tracing of individual neurons.  Graph theoretic and diffusion-based methods are discussed along with results. Furthermore, the comparison and matching of neurons is described. Extensions of this work include the mapping the recently discovered meningeal lymphatic system in the brain as well as using image analysis to unravel mysteries of the glia.

 

 

Biography：

Scott T. Acton is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. degree at Virginia Tech. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

 

Professor Acton’s laboratory at UVA is called VIVA - Virginia Image and Video Analysis. They specialize in biomedical image analysis problems. The research emphasis of VIVA is video tracking and segmentation. Professor Acton has over 275 publications in the image analysis area including the books Biomedical Image Analysis: Tracking and Biomedical Image Analysis: Segmentation. Professor Acton has been at the University of Virginia since 2000. Before that time, he worked in the academic world for Oklahoma State University and in the engineering world for AT&T, Motorola and the Mitre Corporation. He is editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.