Faculty Bibliography

We propose a novel Active Volume Model (AVM) which deforms in a free-form manner to minimize energy. Unlike Snakes and level-set active contours which only consider curves or surfaces, the AVM is a deforming object model that has both boundary and an interior area. When applied to object segmentation and tracking, the model alternates between two basic operations: deform according to current object prediction, and predict according to current appearance statistics of the model. The probabilistic object prediction module relies on the Bayesian Decision Rule to separate foreground (i.e., object represented by the model) and background. Optimization of the model is a natural extension of the Snakes model so that region information becomes part of the external forces. The AVM thus has the efficiency of Snakes while having adaptive region-based constraints. Segmentation results, validation, and comparison with GVF Snakes and level set methods are presented for experiments on noisy 2D/3D medical images

The gene encoding the dipeptidyl peptidase-like protein DPP6 (also known as DPPX) has been associated with human neural disease. However, until recently no function had been found for this protein. It has been proposed that DPP6 is an auxiliary subunit of neuronal Kv4 K(+) channels, the ion channels responsible for the somato-dendritic A-type K(+) current, an ionic current with crucial roles in the regulation of firing frequency, dendritic integration and synaptic plasticity. This view has been supported mainly by studies showing that DPP6 is necessary to generate channels with biophysical properties resembling the native channels in some neurons. However, independent evidence that DPP6 is a component of neuronal Kv4 channels in the brain, and whether this protein has other functions in the CNS is still lacking. We generated antibodies to DPP6 proteins to compare their distribution in brain with that of the Kv4 pore-forming subunits. DPP6 proteins were prominently expressed in neuronal populations expressing Kv4.2 proteins and both types of protein were enriched in the dendrites of these cells, strongly supporting the hypothesis that DPP6 is an associated protein of Kv4 channels in brain neurons. The observed similarity in the cellular and subcellular patterns of expression of both proteins suggests that this is the main function of DPP6 in brain. However, we also found that DPP6 antibodies intensely labeled the hippocampal mossy fiber axons, which lack Kv4 proteins, suggesting that DPP6 proteins may have additional, Kv4-unrelated functions

The present invention relates to synthetic immunogenic but non-amyloidogenic peptides homologous to amyloid beta which can be used alone or conjugated to an immunostimulatory molecule in an immunizing composition for inducing an immune response to amyloid beta peptides and amyloid deposits

Myocardial deformation is a critical indicator of many cardiac diseases and dysfunctions. The goal of this paper is to use myocardial deformation patterns to identify and localize regional abnormal cardiac function in human subjects. We have developed a novel tensor-based classification framework that better conserves the spatio-temporal structure of the myocardial deformation pattern than conventional vector-based algorithms. In addition, the tensor-based projection function keeps more of the information of the original feature space, so that abnormal tensors in the subspace can be back-projected to reveal the regional cardiac abnormality in a more physically meaningful way. We have tested our novel method on 41 human image sequences, and achieved a classification rate of 87.80%. The recovered regional abnormalities from our algorithm agree well with the patient's pathology and doctor's diagnosis and provide a promising avenue for regional cardiac function analysis