Mapping Cellular Alterations in Brain Tissue

When: Friday, September 25, 2015
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Badri Roysam, University of Houston, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department

Host: Prof. Ioannis Kakadiaris

The altered brain needs our urgent attention. While international brain mapping initiatives remain focused on the structure and working of the neuronal networks, conditions like traumatic injury, ischemia, binge alcohol, tumor growth, and experimental drug treatments inflict complex and widespread brain cytoarchitectural alterations that deserve to be mapped. Many of these alterations can be subtle and/or latent, only discernible by sensing changes in cell morphology and/or the expression and/or intra-cellular distribution of specific molecular markers, and can be spread across brain regions that are distant from the injury/damage site. There is a compelling need to detect and quantify brain cytoarchitectural alterations in a sensitive and comprehensive manner, since missed changes in certain brain regions may eventually manifest as confounding clinical conditions, or dangerous side effects. In this talk, I will describe methods for comprehensive profiling of brain cytoarchitectural alterations using multiplexed fluorescence imaging, computational image analysis, atlas fitting, multivariate statistics, and machine learning methods.

Bio:

Badri Roysam is currently the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor, and Chairman of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Houston. He directs the FARSIGHT Project that is focused on developing computational image analysis tools for multi-dimensional biological microscopy. He received the Master of Science and Doctor of Science degrees from Washington University, St. Louis, USA, in 1987 and 1989, respectively. Earlier, he received the Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in 1984. From 1989 to 2010, he was a Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, USA, where he directed the NSF Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS), and co-directed the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software (RCOS).