Invited Talk April 2008

Prof. Ioannis A. Kakadiaris

Prof. Ioannis A. Kakadiaris (Computational Biomedicine Lab, University of Houston) will be giving an invited talk on Thursday, April 24, 2.30pm - 3:15pm, in room MI 03.13.010 on "Cardiovascular Informatics: How to Stop a Heart Attack Before it Happens"

Abstract:

Approximately 1.5 million heart attacks are suffered annually by Americans, and about half of them prove fatal, despite a host of new public health initiatives targeting heart disease and its aggravating factors such as obesity. The case of Former US President Bill Clinton, who underwent quadruple bypass surgery, demonstrates that even a former president with access to the best medical care available can have undiagnosed heart disease. Clinton himself blamed “insufficient vigilance” and stressed the importance of repeated testing as a means of heart disease prevention. Considering the large amounts of data that a comprehensive vascular health screening will produce, there is an urgent need for biomedical image analysis tools (segmentation, shape and motion estimation) to assist in screening for the conditions that underlie sudden cardiac events. In this talk, we present biomedical image analysis tools for the mining of information from cardiovascular imaging for the detection of persons with a high likelihood of developing a heart attack in the near future (vulnerable patients).

Biography:

Prof. Ioannis A. Kakadiaris is an Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston. He joined UH in August 2007 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Ioannis earned his B.Sc. in physics at the University of Athens in Greece, his M.Sc. in computer science from Northeastern University and his Ph. D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the founder of the Computational Biomedicine Lab (www.cbl.uh.edu) and this year directs the Methodist-University of Houston-Weill Cornell Medical College Institute for Biomedical Imaging Sciences (IBIS) (ibis.uh.edu). His research interests include cardiovascular informatics, biomedical image analysis, biometrics, computer vision, and pattern recognition. Dr. Kakadiaris is the recipient of a number of awards, including the NSF Early Career Development Award, Schlumberger Technical Foundation Award, UH Computer Science Research Excellence Award, UH Enron Teaching Excellence Award, and the James Muller Vulnerable Plague Young Investigator Price. His research has been featured on Discovery Channel, National Public Radio, KPRC NBC News, KTRH ABC News, and KHOU CBS News.