A team of researchers at Wayne State University has been awarded $295,022 from the National Science Foundation to develop new computational methods that will be applied to computer assisted diagnosis of various brain diseases.

Ming Dong, Ph.D., associate professor of Computer Science in the College of Liberal Arts, is leading the team on this initiative. Farshad Fotouhi, Ph.D., chair of Computer Science, Mark Haacke, Ph.D., professor of Radiology in the School of Medicine, and Jing Hua, Ph.D., assistant professor of Computer Science are
collaborating with Dong on this project.

According to the grant abstract, compared to the explosive collection of visual datasets, computation techniques for gaining knowledge from very large, diverse, heterogeneous visual datasets have only evolved modestly. This project aims to bridge these gaps and to promote more effective utilization and better understanding of the valuable data.

“The project will foster a strong research program in geometry-guided knowledge discovery in multimodality visual data, with an emphasis on neuroimaging applications,” Dong said. "The project can immediately help to elevate the existing resources and on-going research to a unified, systematic level and strengthen computer
science education."

The ultimate goal of this project is to apply the computational tools to computerassisted diagnosis of brain diseases such as tumors and brain functional disorder. The research team is aiming to identify disease patterns in the human brain, thus providing both clinical and social benefits to a large sector of the population. In addition, they hope to disseminate the research results to both computer science and medical communities through free Web access of the software tools and the set of sample data.

“This project is a great example of the multi-disciplinary collaborative environment that is growing at Wayne State University,” said Gloria Heppner, associate vice president for research at WSU. “By bringing great minds together from departments such as computer science and radiology, new research ideas are being
fostered that will ultimately impact the lives of many.”