This paper develops mathematical representations for neuro-anatomically significant substructures of the brain and their variability in a population. The focus of the paper is on the neuro-anatomical variation of the geometry and the "shape" of 2-dimensional surfaces in the brain. As examples, we focus on the cortical and hippocampal surfaces in an ensemble of Macaque monkeys and human MRI brains. The "shape" of the substructures are quantified via the construction of templates; the variations are represented by defining probabilistic deformations of the template. Methods for empirically estimating probability measures on these deformations are developed by representing the deformations as Gaussian random vector fields on the embedded sub-manifolds. This work was supported by NIH grants RR01380, RO1-MH52158-01A1 , ARO DAAL-03-86-K-0110, ARO DAAH049510494 and NSF grant BIR-9424264 The Gaussian random vector fields are constructed as quadratic mean limits using complete orthonormal b...

Medical imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance (MR), histological images, and positron emission tomography (PET), enable study of anatomy and function in animals and humans. The technology to collect such data greatly exceeds tools to analyze it. This research seeks to address this issue by developing methods that automatically synthesize labeled electronic atlases tailored to individuals. The approach

Pattern theory provides a unified way to represent knowledge in complex systems. We take a pattern theoretic approach to recognizing and tracking ground-based targets in sequences of forward-looking infrared images acquired from an airborne platform. A rich set of transformations on objects represented by three-dimensional faceted models are formulated to accommodate the variability found in FLIR imagery. Our approach seeks the configuration of templates and transformations that provides the best match with the collected sensor data. An hypothesized scene, simulated from the emissive characteristics of the hypothesized scene elements, is compared with the collected data by a likelihood function based on sensor statistics. This likelihood is combined with a prior distribution defined over the set of possible scenes to form a posterior distribution. A jump-diffusion process empirically generates the posterior distribution. The jumps accommodate the discrete aspects of the estimation prob...

the range 3580 GHz. Most pattern theoretic algorithms to date have attempted "passive vision" in the sense that they interpret a given set of data but are not allowed any say in how the data are collected. We intend to extend our framework to formulate "active 45 vision" algorithms [92] which not only interpret available data but make choices on how new data should be gathered to best facilitate inference. In addition to the pointing mechanism, many FLIR sensors provide a variety of magnifications, allowing the choice between high-resolution, narrow field of view images and images with a wider field of view but lower resolution. The algorithm must decide where to point the sensor and what magnification to use. These decisions must be driven by the current state of the inference. For instance, if the algorithm is attemping to recognize a several objects which cannot all fit in the sensor's field of field, with resolution sufficient to perform recognition, the algorithm must have a str

A wide spectrum of research activities have been in progress at Washington University in the field of high speed (0.1--1 Gb/s) communication and distributed imaging applications. Washington University already has a four node operational 150 Mb/s ATM testbed which supports a number of applications including video conferencing on a few platforms, and what we call a physician's workstation. The physician's workstation uses a NeXT computer with high resolution auxiliary display and allows physicians to do video conferencing and also review diagnostic medical images and patient records. A number of other distributed applications with support for remote visualization, multimedia, and collaboration are being developed. Recently, our group has been awarded and begun work under a three year contract from ARPA for research on gigabit networking technology that will lead to a testbed including three ATM switching systems supporting links speeds of 600 Mb/s and 2.4 Gb/s, plus a high speed ATM host...