SPIE Medical Imaging 2017
February medical imaging conferences focus on emerging approaches to precision medicine.
Emerging imaging approaches to individually targeted disease treatment and prevention will be emphasized at SPIE Medical Imaging 2017, to be held 11-16 February in Orlando, FL (USA).
Deep learning and precision medicine will be focal points of the annual event highlighting the latest innovations of leading scientists and engineers working to improve radiology and medical imaging technologies.
SPIE Medical Imaging provides a forum to discuss the latest research in imaging physics, image-guided procedures, computer-aided diagnoses, quantitative imaging, and other topics related to the field of medical imaging.
Medical imaging technologies can give detailed and accurate guidance for surgeons, help clinicians visualize diseased and injured tissue, predict a patient’s response to drug and radiation therapy, and create customized treatment plans based on a precise diagnosis.
“Precision medicine at Medical Imaging will highlight innovative papers involving multidisciplinary approaches across the imaging chain,” notes SPIE President-Elect Maryellen Giger.
An all-symposium plenary session Monday, 13 February, will focus on applying “deep learning” to medical imaging. Greg Corrado, a senior researcher in artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and machine learning at Google (USA), will talk about programming computer software to interpret and evaluate data embedded deeply in medical images.
Corrado has a PhD in neuroscience and has served as one of the founding members and the co-technical lead of Google’s large-scale deep neural networks project. Formed in 2011, the Google Brain Project has developed into a team of more than 40 scientists and engineers.
In addition to Corrado’s plenary talk, there will be keynote talks in each of the nine conferences as well as the PROSTATEx Challenge, the Digital Mammography Dream Challenge, and an Ultrasound Computer Tomography (USCT) Data Challenge. “Such challenges are essential to the growth and translation of technologies utilizing a community of researchers,” Giger adds.
The PROSTATEx Challenge, a “Grand Challenge” on quantitative image analysis methods for diagnosing clinically significant prostate lesions, is being conducted by SPIE, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Data for the challenge were released in late 2016, and participants were asked to submit their results by 15 January. Challenge results will be shared during SPIE Medical Imaging, with the two top-performing challenge participants receiving recognition during the Monday plenary session and presenting their methods during the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) session on Wednesday, 15 February.
The USCT Data Challenge focuses on breast-cancer imaging and has similar deadlines for a friendly competition on the best approaches for image reconstruction. Nicole V. Ruiter of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) and Koen W.A. van Dongen of Technische University Delft (Germany) will moderate a panel discussion on the USCT Data Challenge, at 5 pm Tuesday, 14 February.
The Digital Mammography DREAM Challenge is a competition aimed at improving the accuracy of breast cancer detection and will be part of the CAD conference activities along with the PROSTATEx Challenge.
Along with CAD, conference topics at SPIE Medical Imaging cover the physics of medical imaging, image processing, image-guided procedures, robotics, image perception, imaging informatics, ultrasonic imaging and tomography, and digital pathology.
Among the keynote presenters in the conferences are Margarita Zuley, chief of breast imaging at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (USA), who will discuss a radiologist’s perspective on multimodal breast imaging; SPIE Fellow Kyle Myers of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), discussing the FDA’s role in advancing CAD solutions; and Lasse Løvstakken, a professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) presenting recent progress on ultrafast ultrasound blood-flow imaging.
Anne LeGrand, a senior manager at IBM Watson Health (USA), will explore the potential value of “augmented intelligence” in her keynote presentation at the imaging processing conference.
SPIE Medical Imaging also features 11 onsite courses, a full slate of technical events, including two poster sessions, and workshops and demonstrations on breast imaging, deep learning, and 3D printing.
A workshop on information management, systems integration, standards, and approval issues for the digital operating room will examine the challenges of putting technological advances into operating rooms. It is hosted jointly by SPIE and the International Foundation for Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery.
Symposium chairs for 2017 are Berkman Sahiner of the FDA and SPIE member Leonard Berliner of Weill Cornell Medical College and New York Methodist Hospital (USA).
Read more about SPIE Medical Imaging 2017.
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