Prince/Research
Jerry L. Prince: Research Interests
Image processing, which involves image formation, restoration, and analysis, is an exciting area of research that has applications in the basic sciences, engineering, and medicine. A typical problem uses an image as an intermediate data structure, formed from the raw data, which is to be analyzed further to extract some desired information. This information, be it the location of a defect in a manufactured material or the size of the cardiac cross section in a medical image, can be best determined only after thoroughly understanding the physics of the imaging process and characterizing all available prior knowledge. Given this understanding, one can develop signal processing algorithms that may involve concepts from random signals, statistical inference, optimization theory, and digital signal processing. A complete performance analysis which incorporates both analytic error evaluation and subjective performance evaluation on real data is an important last stage in the process of algorithm development.
Professor Prince conducts research in the Image Analysis and Communications Laboratory and in the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering , where he holds joint appointments. He and his graduate students are currently involved in several research projects in medical imaging. In one project they are developing methods to estimate cardiac motion using magnetic resonance imaging for ultimate use in the diagnosis of heart disease. In another project they are analyzing magnetic resonance images of the brain to develop a mathematical map of the human cortex. They are also exploring new methods in computed tomography for application in computer integrated surgery. Large-scale numerical computations are necessary for most research tasks in this area, and implementation on parallel architectures will be essential in the near future.
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