The same techniques used to detect suspicious activity in airports, stadiums and other public places are now being used by the UCF researcher who invented them to find and measure potentially life-threatening brain tumors.

Mubarak Shah, UCF’s Agere Chair professor of computer science and one of the world’s most eminent researchers in the rapidly developing field of computer imaging, has received $400,000 from the National Institutes of Health to develop a computer program to analyze brain scans produced by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI.)

The two-year grant, the first UCF has received from money allocated by the American Recovery and Re-investment stimulus program, will enable Shah and his collaborators - Dr. Nicholas Avgeropoulos, a neuro-oncologist with Orlando Health System and Dr. David Rippe, a neuroradiologist at Florida Hospital Heartland - to work together on the complex task of automatically measure and compare the size of a tumor in 3D from MRI scans.

Although physicians have used three dimensional imaging (such as MRI) for years to detect ever-smaller tumors, standard practice is still to analyze and interpret the films by eye. The manual process is time intensive and subject to misinterpretation. Automated analysis of a small data set using Shah’s preliminary method has been shown to be up to 90 percent accurate compared to the analyses provided by the radiologists.

Shah said some of the challenges include making sure the typically low-resolution scans can be converted to the high-resolution images needed for computers to precisely measure tumors. He must also perform extensive experiments with large data set to validate his method and has partnered with a UCF biostatistician, Xiaogang Su, to ensure that the measurements are statistically correct.

 

Return to Main Page