Medical Image Registration at Vanderbilt University

Professor Fitzpatrick has since 1982 been a member of the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He will give an overview of work related to the registration of medical images. Registration is the aligning of images to each other or to physical objects, and it has been used in the analysis of satellite images since before the 1970s. The application to medicine began in the early 1980s, when MR imaging began to rival CT clinically and computer speeds began to support the updating of image displays in the operating room in real time. The registration of medical images has been a focus of research at Vanderbilt throughout this period, with primary emphasis on surgical guidance, and that research has profited from close collaborations with diverse faculty in Vanderbilt’s medical center, facilitated by its location next to the engineering school. This talk will present an engineering perspective of Vanderbilt’s current work in this area and the twenty years of research that has led to it.