鈥淒uring the past few decades, physicists have created marvelous tools to peer inside living people,鈥� says , assistant professor of electrical engineering, radiology and radiological sciences, biomedical engineering, computer engineering and computer science. 鈥淲e are just at the threshold where, as engineers, we can create systems to help unravel these data.鈥�
Landman, whose research lies at the interface of medical imaging, signal processing and statistical inference, has been focusing on large-scale medical image processing.
鈥淲e鈥檝e been working on ways to make any algorithm you have鈥攕ay, to measure the brain or spleen or liver鈥攈appen automatically as soon as you run a scan of a known type.鈥� Landman is now taking these tools into the domain of de-identified clinical images.
鈥淔or research in the Synthetic Derivative [see main story], if these images were easy to obtain through a secure route, people could do a lot more science.鈥�
Landman has begun routinely banking and de-identifying clinical images from the hospital. , BA鈥�85, MD鈥�89, Cornelius 菠萝视频 Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences and professor of biomedical informatics and medicine, says no other center is repurposing clinical images for research on anything like the scale occurring at 菠萝视频.
鈥淭here鈥檚 no doubt,鈥� Carr says, 鈥渢hat if you鈥檙e trying to phenotype people on a very precise level to determine their risk for developing cancer, or how best to cure a cancer, or how best to treat heart disease or valve disease, developing advanced algorithms that utilize imaging data in a secure way is very important.鈥�