Events Calendar

Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series

Speaker: Assad Oberai, Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Talk Title: Biomechanical Imaging: Shall We See How You Feel?

Series: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series

Abstract: Certain types of diseases lead to changes in the microstructural organization of tissue. Altered microstructure in turn leads to altered macroscopic tissue properties, which are often easier to image than the microstructure itself. Thus the measurement of macroscopic properties offers a window into tissue microstructure and health. In Biomechanical Imaging (BMI) we aim to utilize this association between the macroscopic mechanical properties of tissue and its health by generating images of the mechanical properties and using these to infer tissue microstructure and health.
At the heart of BMI lies the solution of an inverse problem in continuum mechanics: given the deformation of the medium (tissue) and a constitutive model, determine the spatial distribution of the material properties. In this talk, I will discuss the well-posedness of this inverse problem and describe efficient and robust algorithms for solving it. I will also describe the development of new constitutive models that are motivated by tissue microstructure, and applications of BMI that include improved in-vivo diagnosis of breast cancer, and imaging elastic properties of tissue at the cellular, and sub-cellular levels.

Biography: Assad Oberai is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He is also the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the School of Engineering, and the Associate Director of the Scientific Computation Research Center (SCOREC). Assad is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career award in 2005 and the Department of Energy Early Career award in 2004. He was awarded the Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2007. He received the Humboldt Foundation Award for experienced researchers in 2009, and the Erasmus Mundus Master Course Lectureship at Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Barcelona in 2010. In 2015, he was awarded the Research Excellence Award by the School of Engineering at RPI, and was elected as a Fellow of the United States Association of Computational Mechanics (USACM). In 2016, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He is on the board of academic editors for the journal PlosOne.

Host: Prof. Roger Ghanem

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - Biomechanical Imaging: Shall We See How You Feel?

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Valerie Childress