Events Calendar

Medical Imaging Seminar Series

Speaker: Prof. Michael Insana, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Talk Title: "On The Design And Evaluation Of Sonographic Systems For Cancer Diagnosis”

Abstract: The best-possible performance of any imaging system can be measured using ideal-observer analysis. Comparing ideal performance with that of human observers, it is possible to predict the efficiency of a system for achieving its clinical design goals. Rigorous and objective assessments of imaging quality are now well developed for x-ray and -ray imaging modalities but not for sonography. This seminar summarizes recent work from our group in sonographic instrument design and performance assessment for the task of breast lesion diagnosis.
First, we define task information using Kullback-Leibler divergence by combining ideas from information theory and acoustic scattering with medical practice. We then define the test statistic of the ideal observer of breast lesions and relate its performance metrics to fundamental engineering properties that describe system noise, image contrast and spatial resolution. We show how unique aspects of acoustic contrast generation present unique challenges to defining the ideal observer and relating its performance to engineering properties. The efficiency of human observers at discriminating lesion features was found to be less than 10% and highly dependent on specifics of the visual task. The greatest loss of task information occurs during the demodulation step of image formation. However adaptive filtering of the echo signals before and after beamforming was found to significantly increase diagnostic information transfer through the demodulator and thus improves the diagnostic performance of sonography for lesion feature discrimination.

Biography: Michael F. Insana is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois. He also has appointments in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where he leads the Bio-Imaging Science and Technology group. His current research interests are to develop new ultrasonic methods for the diagnosis and treatment monitoring of breast cancer. He is also interested in eigenanalysis for sensing cancer-related transitions in cell networks as a basis for developing molecular imaging methods. Mike is a fellow of the IEEE, Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Physics, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He has been Associate Editor for the IEEE Transaction on Medical Imaging since 1997 and currently chairs that journal’s Steering Committee.

Host: Prof. Krishna Nayak

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia Veal