Anas Zainul Abidin, PhD student in our group, received a travel grant from the Wismüller Lab to attend and present at the centennial Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America 2014, which was held in Chicago from Nov 30th to Dec 5th. Anas presented two scientific papers entitled “Improving Bone Strength Prediction in Proximal Femur Specimens through Quantitative Characterization of Trabecular Micro-architecture with Minkowski Functionals and Support Vector Regression” (authored by Chien-Chun Yang et al.) and “Improving Femoral Bone Strength Prediction through Characterization of Trabecular Micro-architecture with Anisotropic Minkowski Functionals and Quantitative Anisotropy Measures” (authored by Mahesh Nagarajan et al.). Congratulations to Anas on his well-received scientific presentations!

Adora DSouza, master student at the Wismüller Lab, presented a scientific poster by our group entitled, “Nonlinear Functional Connectivity Analysis in the Human Brain on Resting State fMRI: Mutual Connectivity Analysis with Non-Metric Clustering”. The methodology explained on this poster will be used to compare functional connectivity of brain networks in non-HIV and HIV patients. Adora was selected as one of the recipients of the University of Rochester Center for Aids Research (CFAR) World AIDS Day Poster Award for her presentation.

A workshop on functionally connectivity analysis in resting state fMRI will be held from Aug. 20 to Aug. 22 at the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging (RCBI). The workshop will be organized by Dr. Axel Wismüller of the University of Rochester and Dr. Lutz Leistritz of Friedrich Schiller University (Jena, Germany). The goal of this workshop will be to discuss ideas related to analytic methods for recovering functionally connected networks in the human brain through resting state fMRI. Topics will include (but not limited to) mutual connectivity analysis, granger causality, non-metric clustering, independent component analysis etc.

The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA®) is an international society of radiologists, medical physicists and other medical professionals with more than 53,000 members from 140 countries across the globe. RSNA hosts the world’s premier radiology forum, drawing approximately 55,000 attendees annually to McCormick Place in Chicago.

Dr. Wismüller's research group will present two talks at RSNA this year titled Improving Bone Strength Prediction in Proximal Femur Specimens Through Characterization of Trabecular Micro-architecture with Minkowski Functionals and Support Vector Regression and Improving Femoral Bone Strength Prediction Through Characterization of Trabecular Micro-architecture with Anisotropic Minkowski Functionals and Quantitative Anisotropic Measures.

Mahesh Nagarajan's doctoral thesis titled " A Framework for Computer-Aided Diagnosis with Novel Computational Methods for Characterizing Healthy and Pathological Soft Tissue Patterns on Medical Images" was selected to receive commendation in the Outstanding Dissertation Award competition for engineering.

Additionally, Mahesh was also awarded the Outstanding Thesis Award from the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Congratulations!