Yuri Boykov, Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Recent 3D imaging technologies can capture whole organ’s vessel system resolving it to near-capillary level. This raises a possibility of reconstructing the entire vasculature tree, which is needed for better understanding of anatomy, computer assisted diagnosis, drug development. However, computational challenges are significant, for example due to noise, outliers, and acquisition artifacts. We discuss standard mathematical models and inference algorithms for thin structure estimation (an old image analysis problem) and show difficulties for a large-scale reconstruction of vasculature. Complex global tree topology should be automatically estimated, which yields interesting problems combining geometric modelling and combinatorial optimization. We focus on geometric regularization priors based on curvature, as well as, known tree divergence (aorta or vein) and discuss useful generalizations of minimum spanning tree algorithms.
Bio: Yuri Boykov is a Professor at Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He is also an adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Western University. His research is concentrated in the area of computer vision and biomedical image analysis with focus on modeling and optimization for structured segmentation, restoration, registration, stereo, motion, model fitting, recognition, photo-video editing and other data analysis problems. He is an editor for the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV). His work was listed among 10 most influential papers in IEEE Transactions of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI Top Picks for 30 years). In 2017 Google Scholar listed his work on segmentation as a "classic paper in computer vision and pattern recognition" (from 2006). In 2011 he received Helmholtz Prize from IEEE and Test of Time Award by the International Conference on Computer Vision. The Faculty of Science at the University of Western Ontario recognized his work by awarding Distinguished Research Professorship in 2014 and Florence Bucke Prize in 2008.
He received "Diploma of Higher Education with Honors" at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (department of Electrical Engineering and Cybernetics) in 1992 and completed his Ph.D. at the department of Operations Research at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1996.