Center for Biomedical Image Computing and Analytics (CBICA) Seminar (virtual)
“Using postmortem imaging of the human brain in Alzheimer’s disease to improve in vivo biomarkers”
Paul Yushkevich, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Radiology
University of Pennsylvania
Sadhana Ravikumar
5th year PhD candidate
Bioengineering department, advised by Dr. Paul Yushkevich
Mengjin Dong
5th year PhD candidate
Bioengineering department, advised by Dr. Paul Yushkevich
Pulkit Khandelwal
3rd year PhD candidate
Bioengineering department, advised by Dr. Paul Yushkevich
Abstract:
Our group uses computational analysis of ex vivo and in vivo human brain imaging data to further the understanding of pathologic heterogeneity of Alzheimer’s disease, mapping the impact of pathology on structural changes that can be observed with in vivo imaging, and translation into more powerful biomarkers for AD clinical trials. This presentation will combine short talks by three Ph.D. students in our group. Sadhana Ravikumar will describe work on building a computational atlas of the human medial temporal lobe from high-resolution ex vivo MRI and serial histology and using this atlas to explore relative contributions of tau and TDP-43 pathology to neurodegeneration. Pulkit Khandelwal will describe work on automatic segmentation of cerebral cortex, subcortical gray matter structures, and white matter hyperintensities in high-resolution MRI of ex vivo brain hemispheres, approaches which enable inferences about the contribution of multiple molecular pathologies and small vessel disease to regional neurodegeneration in AD. Mengjin Dong will discuss a novel approach to quantifying atrophy in longitudinal in vivo MRI that combines the strengths of deformation-based morphometry to pinpoint local patterns of atrophy with the ability of deep learning to automatically detect the temporal order of longitudinal scans.
Bios:
Paul Yushkevich is a Professor of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, co-director of the Neuroimaging Core of the Penn Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and member of the PICSL lab. His research interests include computational image analysis, neurodegenerative disease, and open-source software.
Sadhana Ravikumar is a 5th year PhD candidate in the Bioengineering department, advised by Dr. Paul Yushkevich in the PICSL lab. Her dissertation research focuses on the development of image segmentation and groupwise registration techniques for analyzing high resolution ex vivo MRI of the medial temporal lobe, towards the goal of understanding pathology-structure correlations in the context of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Mengjin Dong is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in Bioengineering, advised by Dr. Paul Yushkevich in the PICSL lab. Her dissertation research is to develop deep learning based image registration tools with in vivo T1 longitudinal images to reduce the effect of noise in longitudinal measurements of the medial temporal lobe region. Ultimately, her goal is to get a sensitive atrophy rate as an outcome measurement for potential clinical trials.
Pulkit Khandelwal is a 3rd year PhD student in the department of Bioengineering, supervised by Dr. Paul Yushkevich in the PICSL lab. His primary research interests include developing image segmentation, registration and morphometry analysis frameworks for high resolution ex vivo MRI of human brain hemispheres, to understand the relationship between neuropathology and morphometry in Alzheimer’s Disease. To this end, he leverages deep learning methods such as meta-learning, domain generalization, image-translation and few-shot learning.