Computational Medicine: Problems, Solutions, and Research Trends

Speaker:        Professor Danny Z. Chen
                Department of Computer Science and Engineering
                University of Notre Dame
                USA

Title:          "Computational Medicine: Problems, Solutions,
                 and Research Trends"

Date:           Monday, 23 March 2015

Time:           11:30am - 12:30pm

Venue:          Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Computer technology plays a vital role in modern medicine and life
sciences, especially in diagnostic imaging, human genome study, medical
surgery and therapy, and medical data management.  As computing technology
continues to evolve, computer science research and development will
inevitably become an important part of modern medicine.  However, despite
a great deal of research efforts, many key computational problems in the
medical field are still not well understood.  Active participation of
computer science researchers in formulating and solving core medical
problems is urgently needed.  Since computational problems in modern
medicine have direct impact on the quality of life, the development of
high quality computational solutions for medical problems is highly
crucial to today's society.

In this talk, we present a set of important computational problems and
solutions in medical research and applications.  In particular, we discuss
a number of computational problems that arise in emerging medical studies
and clinical practice, including cell identification and cell distribution
analysis (in diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer and auto-immune
diseases, and in stem cell study of leukemia bone marrow
micro-environments), segmentation of many different medical objects (e.g.,
blood clots, joint structures, retinal layers, airway and vascular
networks, etc), motion tracking of massive swarming bacteria, etc.  We
show how to formulate these problems as algorithmic problems, and provide
effective solutions for solving them.  Examples of many-core parallel
algorithms are also given for some medical problems that require an
enormous amount of computation.  Further, we show experimental data and
results to illustrate the clinical applications of our approaches.
Finally, we outline some possible future research trends of this exciting
emerging area.


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Biography:

Dr. Danny Z. Chen received the B.S. degrees in Computer Science and in
Mathematics from the University of San Francisco, California, USA in 1985,
and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Purdue University,
West Lafayette, Indiana, USA in 1988 and 1992, respectively. He has been
on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at
the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA since 1992, and is currently a
full Professor.  Dr. Chen's main research interests are in computational
biomedicine, biomedical imaging, computational geometry, algorithms and
data structures, data mining, and VLSI.  He has published many journal and
conference papers in these areas. He also holds 5 US patents for
technology development in computer science and engineering and biomedical
applications.  Dr. Chen is a Fellow of IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist
of ACM.  He received the CAREER Award of the US National Science
Foundation (NSF) in 1996, the James A. Burns, C.S.C. Award for Graduate
Education of the University of Notre Dame in 2009, and was given a
Laureate Award in the 2011 Computerworld Honors Program for the work of
his team on "Arc-Modulated Radiation Therapy".