Professorship Lecture and Ceremony: Signal processing methods for improving medical imaging

Imaging is used extensively in medicine for patient diagnosis, treatment monitoring, and basic research. Image quality depends on both the physical instrumentation and on the algorithms used to reconstruct the images from the raw data acquired by the scanners. This talk will illustrate how statistical signal processing methods have impacted certain medical imaging applications and related fields during the quarter century plus that Prof. Fessler has collaborated with colleagues and students at U-M.

Image reconstruction is a type of inverse problem and William Root was studying inverse problems several decades ago, exploring how convex constraints affect existence and stability of image reconstruction problems. Such problems remain of great interest day, often under the umbrella of "compressed sensing."

Jeff Fessler is a world-renowned leader in medical image reconstruction. He has revolutionized the theory and practice of medical imaging with his group's groundbreaking mathematical models and algorithms that significantly improve both patient safety and image quality. He has produced major improvements in the theory, design and clinical use of scanners in radionuclide imaging (PET/SPECT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and X-ray computer tomography (X-ray CT).

Prof. Fessler received a BSEE from Purdue University, a master's degree in electrical engineering and statistics from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Before joining the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1995, he had faculty appointments in the Division of Nuclear Medicine and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Michigan. He currently holds appointments in the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, and is affiliated with the U-M Cancer Center.

In addition to his extensive service in the department, he has served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging. He was co-chair of the 1997 SPIE conference on Image Reconstruction and Restoration, and general chair of the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging. He received the Edward Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award in 2013, and is a Fellow of IEEE. Prof. Fessler holds eight U.S. patents, and has graduated 52 Ph.D. students.