ECE Seminar Speaker: Dr. Vasiliki N. Ikonomidou, George Mason University

Abstract:
Magnetic resonance imaging is currently the technique of choice for describing brain anatomy and function both in healthy and diseased brains. A typical MRI exam produces hundreds of megabytes of data, making processing and information extraction a daunting task.

A typical processing pipeline includes image processing techniques aimed at both image enhancement and feature extraction, and data mining in the resulting feature set in order to identify disease or evolution patterns of interest. The talk will discuss developed techniques and their applications in Multiple Sclerosis and chemotherapy patients.

Biography:
Vasiliki N. Ikonomidou obtained the Diploma in Electrical Engineering and the PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1997 and 2002, respectively.

In 2003, she joined the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) at the NIH in Bethesda, MD, where she conducted postdoctoral research on the development of novel MRI techniques for optimizing contrast in high field strength MRI. In 2006, she joined the Neuroimmunology Branch of NINDS, where she had the opportunity to apply her research to diagnosis and disease monitoring problems in neurological patients, with emphasis in Multiple Sclerosis. Since August 2009, she has been an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University, where she continues to pursue her research interests to develop optimized MRI techniques and post-processing protocols for detection of early neurodegeneration in the human brain. Dr. Ikonomidou has co-authored 19 journal papers and over 60 conference papers.

The Seminar is open to the public free of charge.