 | James Duncan |
James Duncan, newly named as the Ebenezer K. Hunt Professor of Biomedical Engineering,
has focused his research and teaching in the areas of biomedical image processing
and analysis.
T H I S
James Duncan is named
the Ebenezer K. Hunt Professor
Duncan, who holds joint appointments in diagnostic radiology and electrical engineering,
is the associate chair and director of undergraduate studies in the Department
of Biomedical Engineering as well as the vice-chair for bioimaging sciences research
in diagnostic radiology. He is particularly interested in the use of model-based
mathematical strategies for the analysis of biomedical images. He helped pioneer
the use of geometrical models for segmenting deformable (typically anatomical)
objects of approximately known shape and for tracking certain forms of non-rigid
object motion, and later soft tissue deformation, most notably that of the heart.
Duncan and his research team performed seminal work starting in 1987 on the use
of parameterized global shape models to incorporate a notion of known prior object
shape into the segmentation process using a Bayesian reasoning strategy, helping
lead the way towards the use of strategies for automatically finding certain
known anatomical structure from any of a variety of medical (e.g. computer tomography
(CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound) and biological (e.g. confocal
microscopy) images.
The strategies he developed have resulted in major advances in bioimaging. He
and his research collaborators have applied these strategies to locate the cortical
gray matter layer and a variety of co-localized subcortical gray matter structures
in the brain as well as to locate the structure near the prostate gland. More
recently, Duncan’s team has begun to show that these same techniques will
be useful for estimating gray matter-constrained activations from functional
MRI data and could help guide the recovery of quantitative biochemical information
from MR spectroscopy.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Duncan also pioneered using shape features on the
inner and outer surfaces of the heart wall as material tags for tracking left
ventricular motion. This technique was successfully applied to other non-rigid
tracking problems in cell biology and became the basis for a variety of efforts
internationally. Duncan and his research team used this strategy for more sophisticated
analysis in echocardiography. The team’s approach is now recognized in
the medical-image-analysis community as among the first to incorporate true physical
models into image analysis strategies and has helped develop a more general area
of physical/biomechanical model-based recovery of both structural and functional
information from biomedical images. Duncan’s laboratory has also developed
initial forms of these techniques to estimate brain shift during epilepsy neurosurgery
and guide fractionated prostate radiotherapy, among other uses. His work has
resulted in three U.S. patents.
Duncan is the principal investigator of major research funded by the National
Institutes of Health. Before coming to Yale in 1983, he worked for Hughes Aircraft
Company. He holds a B.S.E.E. from Lafayette College, an M.S. from the University
of California at Los Angeles and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.
Duncan is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He is president
of the International Society for Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted
Intervention and is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
and the I.E.E.E. Computer Society, among other professional organizations.
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ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPS
Dr. Richard Belitsky is the Harold W. Jockers Associate Professor
James Duncan is named the Ebenezer K. Hunt Professor
Dr. Erol Fikrig appointed the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor
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