CVC Seminar Web Feb 16, 1:30-3pm, ACES 4.304

Dr. Ozan Oktem

Computational Anatomy – An approach to incorporate a priori shape information into 3D electron microscopy

Bearing in mind the limited expertise of the speaker, this seminar will be held more as a discussion group rather than a regular seminar. I will try to provide a rough overview of Computational Anatomy which is an emerging discipline at the interface of geometry, statistics and image analysis, that aims to analyse and model biological shape variability at the population scale. The goal is not only to model the normal mean anatomy and its normal variations among a population, but also to discover morphological differences between normal and pathological populations, and possibly to detect, model and classify pathologies from structural abnormalities. Another goal is to correlate this variability information with other functional, genetic or structural information. The field involves advanced differential geometry and partial differential equations for defining a metric between shapes as well as statistics on the set of shapes for computing a “mean” and a “deviation” from the set of observed shapes. Our goal is to explore the possible usages of Computational Anatomy in capturing molecular shape variability. Can one construct probability densities describing the distribution of molecular shapes? If so, how can that information be used in image analysis as well as in 3D reconstruction methods?