Abbas Cheddad, senior lecturer at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), will give a trial lecture for appointment as a docent 30 August 2017.

Title of the lecture: “Medical image analysis: a computational approach in diabetes research”

Subject: Computer Science

Date: Wednesday 30^th August, @ 14:15

Venue: Room J1610, House J, Floor  1, BTH, Campus Gräsvik, Karlskrona.

The lecture is open to the public.

The lecture will be held in English.

Medical imaging is a scientific field that applies digital image processing and analysis to medical scanned images in order to address a specific medical issue. It is a multidisciplinary area that bridges applied computer science to medical/biological sciences. Needless to say medical imaging has proven to play a major role in visualisation of medical data. Medical images are generated using different technologies (scanners). For example, optical projection tomography (OPT) has emerged as a powerful three-dimensional (3D) scanning tool for the study of small biomedical specimen. However, there are challenges related to the process of image generation using OPT technology, which are manifested in a couple of quality concerns. The commercial OPT scanners come with some functionalities to partially address some of these concerns, but unfortunately, the provided solutions are neither adequate nor practical. Besides, other concerns remain unaddressed. In this lecture, I will expose my previous research conducted in collaboration between researcher in medical sciences and computer scientists. I will give a brief overview of the mechanics surrounding the OPT scanning process and its limitations. Subsequently, I will present computational tools that I conceived to further improve OPT image acquisition and tomographic reconstructions. The lecture will demonstrate my contributions from a computer science perspective but in conjunction with research linked to diabetes. The talk will conclude with examples of some final 3D reconstructions. Future work in this area is planned to generate a large reference database of optical tomographic image data sets along with quantitative assessments that can enable studies in a variety of in-vivo or ex-vivo experiments to use statistical analyses and multidimensional data evaluation. I will also continue to administer the software package which I developed and which is used at several research centres worldwide.

In 2009, Abbas Cheddad earned his PhD degree in computer science from the faculty of Computing and Engineering at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, UK. Cheddad’s research interests lie at the intersection of image processing, computer vision, information security, applied machine learning and medical sciences and biology (e.g., 3D reconstruction, Optical projection tomography, Steganography, Medical image analysis, Quantitative imaging bio-markers, Pattern localisation and recognition, Characterization and validation of imaging bio-markers, Evaluation of the association between image-based phenotypes and genomic biomarkers, and Algorithms for the computer-guided analysis of multi-dimensional microscopy-data sets). At BTH, Cheddad is participating in the large research project, scalable resource-efficient systems for big data analytics, where close research collaboration with industry is key for the project execution. Cheddad has contributed with one invited book chapter, received two granted patents and has co/authored 50 publications, of which 22 are publications made after his PhD studies. Cheddad received grants worth of ~ 900,000 SEK in total and was involved in the supervision of three PhD students of which two have graduated and dozens of MSc students.

For more information, contact Abbas Cheddad via phone on 0455-38 58 63.

After the lecture, there will be coffee and cake served in the open space in the DIDD corridor.

To sign up, please reply to this or email forskningforskarniva@bth.se , no later than August 24.