April Khademi

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          This talk concerns the development of a novel contrast enhancement algorithm for FLAIR (Fluid Attenuation Inversion Recovery)-weighted cerebral MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) with white matter lesions (WML). The proposed method utilizes both a robust estimate of edge magnitude and intensity values to discriminate between pathological and non-pathological information. These two features are combined through several transformations, such that WML are highlighted, and normal appearing white/gray matter are suppressed. The technique utilizes information solely computed from each image and thus adapts to the input image’s characteristics. The results show a significant improvement of the contrast between white matter lesions and other brain tissue (average contrast improvement of 41.1%). To demonstrate the robustness of such an enhancement scheme for WML analysis, a threshold-based segmenter is applied, which extracts the WML with good results.
          This work was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Anastasios Venetsanopoulos, VP, Research and Innovation, Ryerson University, Dean of Engineering and Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Canada, and with Dr. Alan Moody, Chief Radiologist, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center, Toronto.

          April Khademi is a Ph.D. student in the Communications Group, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. She is under the supervision of Dr. Anastasios (Tas) Venetsanopoulos .
          Her reserach is focused on the development of image processing techniques for automated analysis of MR images of the brain. In particular, such schemes will be utilized to automatically quantify white matter lesions (a neurodegenerative disease). The application of such research results in software-based devices, which assist physicians in quantification of pathology. Such objective analysis is not available with traditional radiology technniques.
          She received a Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.) in 2004 and a Master's of Applied Science (M.A.Sc.) degree in 2006, both from Ryerson University. The title of her M.A.Sc. thesis was "Multiresolutional Analysis for Classification and Compression of Medical Images". In 2006, she was awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal for outstanding M.A.Sc. thesis and academic excellence.
          April Khademi is the Regional Student Representative for IEEE Canada and the Chair of IEEE Toronto's GOLD group. She also offer Consulting Services through Khademi Consulting in the biomedical, signal and image processing domains.