Dr. Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

IMT Lucca

Towards personalized ‘one button imaging’ for cardiac MRI

Abstract: Cardiovascular disease is one of the most prevalent diseases in the world and Cardiac MRI provides a unique opportunity to help understand cardiovascular physiology and treat disease. I will present our recent work towards non-invasive, needle free approaches to ischemia diagnosis with cardiac BOLD imaging. Since those approaches rely on image analysis and processing, I will present our work on how to best extract biophysical information from such studies. Specifically, I will show how subspace decompositions with structured shift-invariant dictionary learning can be used to learn how the oxygenation of the heart is modulated by disease, and how we can use this information coupled with one-class SVMs to establish unsupervised mechanisms for ischemia detection. Furthermore, since we do need to segment and register the myocardium to extract relevant information, I will show recent findings on how sparse feature learning (currently based on dictionaries) can be used to introduce intensity invariance when representing the myocardium in this data. I will conclude, showing our vision on how to achieve personalized non-invasive cardiac imaging with distributed sensing (imaging) and remote processing.

Bio: Dr. Tsaftaris, obtained his PhD and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from Northwestern University, USA in 2006 and 2003 respectively. He obtained his Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. From 2006 to 2011, he was a research assistant professor with the Departments of EECS and Radiology, Northwestern University, USA. Since 2011, he is with IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, where he is a faculty and also the Director of the Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis Unit. He also maintains adjunct appointments with Northwestern University. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics and for Digital Signal Processing - Journal (Elsevier). He has organized specialized workshops at ECCV (2014) and BMVC (2015) and will serve as an Area Chair for IEEE VCIP (2015). He has also served as guest editor (Machine Vision and Applications). He has received twice the Magna Cum Laude Award by the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in 2012 and 2014, and was a finalist for the Early Career Award, from the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SCMR) in 2011. He has authored more than 100 journal and conference papers particularly in interdisciplinary fields. His research interests are in image analysis (medical image computing), image processing, data mining and machine learning, and distributed computing. Dr Tsaftaris is a Murphy, Onassis, and Marie Curie Fellow. He is also member of IEEE, ISMRM, SCMR, and IAPR.

Personal web site: http://tsaftaris.com

Lab web site: http://prian.imtlucca.it/