Controlled Active Vision/Image Processing with Applications to Medical Image Computing

11:45am lunch served and lectureIn this talk, we will describe some theory and practice of controlled active vision. The applications range from visual tracking (e.g., laser tracking in turbulence, flying in formation of UAVs, etc.), nanoparticle flow control, and sedation control in the intensive care unit. Our emphasis will be on the medical side, especially image guided therapy and surgery. This includes projects such as radiation planning in cancer therapy, traumatic brain injury, and left atrial fibrillation. Accordingly, we will describe several models of active contours for which both local (edge-based) and global (statistics-based) information may be included for various segmentation tasks. We will indicate how statistical estimation and prediction ideas (e.g., particle filtering) may be naturally combined with this methodology. A novel model of directional active contour models based on the Finsler metric will be considered that may be employed for white matter brain tractography. Very importantly, we will describe some ideas from feedback control that may be used to close the loop around and robustify the typical open-loop segmentation algorithms in computer vision. The talk is designed to be accessible to a general applied mathematical/engineering audience with an interest in vision, control, and image processing. We will demonstrate our techniques on a wide variety of data sets from various medical imaging modalities.