The CSE 30th Anniversary Colloquium Series presents Danny Chen

The CSE 30th Anniversary Colloquium Series presents

Computational Approaches for Medical and Health Care Problems

Danny Chen

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Notre Dame

11am in ITEB 336 on Friday March 25

Computer technology plays a vital role in modern medicine, health care, and life sciences, especially in diagnostic imaging, human genome study, clinical diagnosis and prognosis, treatment planning and optimization, and medical data management and analysis. As computing technology continues to evolve, computer science research and development will inevitably become an integral part of modern medicine and health care. Computational research and applications in modeling, formulating, and solving core problems in medicine and health care are not only crucially needed, but are actually indispensable. Since computational problems and solutions in modern medicine and health care have direct impacts on the quality of life and well-being in society, the development of effective computational approaches and algorithms for medical and health care problems is absolutely critical.

In this talk, we present a set of important computational problems and approaches in modern medical research, clinical practice, and applications. In particular, we discuss computational problems that arise in medical imaging, clinical diagnosis, and treatment optimization. These include identification and distribution analysis of immune cells (for diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer, inflammation diseases, and auto-immune diseases, and in stem cell study of leukemia bone marrow micro-environments), image analysis for many 3D medical objects (e.g., blood clots, joint structures, retinal layers, airway and vascular networks, etc), motion tracking of massive swarming bacteria in image movies, optimized radiation cancer treatment, etc. We demonstrate new models for formulating such problems as computational problems, and provide effective approaches for solving them. Further, we show experimental data and results to illustrate the clinical applications of our approaches. Finally, we highlight some important future research trends and problems in the exciting emerging area of computational medicine and health care.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Danny Ziyi 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 Professor. Dr. Chen’s main research interests are in computational geometry, computational biomedicine, biomedical imaging, 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 a Laureate Award in the 2011 Computerworld Honors Program for “Arc-Modulated Radiation Therapy” for developing a new radiation cancer treatment approach.