Medical Physics Lunchtime Seminar: Eugenio Iglesias

Analyzing the human brain at the substructure level with multimodal MRI

Abstract:

Image segmentation is a prerequisite for a wide array of subsequent analysis, e.g., volumetry, shape analysis. While much effort has been placed by the neuroimaging community to segment whole brain structures (e.g., whole hippocampus, whole amygdala), my research aims at producing segmentations at the substructure level, e.g., hippocampal subfields, amygdaloid nuclei. Using high-resolution models built from ex vivo human brains, such methods can take advantage of the improved resolution and contrast of modern, multi-modal MRI acquisition, in order to produce much more detailed signatures of human neuroanatomy. 

In this talk, I will first describe some of my postdoctoral work on techniques that can deal with mismatches in image intensities and resolutions, which is the scenario when one uses ultra-high resolution, ex vivo MRI scans to analyze in vivo images. Then, I will provide an overview of my current project at UCL, which builds on my postdoctoral research and aims at building a probabilistic human brain atlas at a superior level of detail using histology. Switching from ex vivo MRI to histology provides us with much better contrast and resolution, but poses new challenges in terms of: 1. Recovering the geometric distortion produced by the cutting and staining of the tissue, and also in terms; 2. Creating ground truth segmentations for huge amounts of histological images; and 3. Bridging the increased resolution gap between the training (histology) and test data (in vivo MRI).

Biography:

Juan Eugenio Iglesias studied Telecom Engineering at the University of Seville, (Spain), and then moved to Stockholm (Sweden) for a second M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering at KTH. During his M.Sc. thesis work in Sweden, he became interested in medical imaging problems, and worked as a research assistant for one year at the University of Seville and another year at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), before being awarded a Fulbright grant to carry out his doctoral studies at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA). He was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School in Boston, before returning to Spain (San Sebastian), where he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) with a Marie Curie fellowship. He was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2015, which he started at UCL last year as a senior research fellow. 

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