Summary of research

The objective of CBA is to carry out research and education in computerized image analysis and perceptualisation. We are pursuing this objective through a large number of research projects, ranging from fundamental mathematical methods development, to application-tailored development and testing, the latter mainly in biomedicine. We also have interdisciplinary collaboration with the humanities mainly through our projects on handwritten text recognition. We are also developing new methods for perceptualisation, combining computer graphics, haptics, and image processing. Our research is organized in many projects of varying size, ranging in effort from a few person months to several person years. There is a lot of interaction between different researchers; generally, a person is involved in several different projects in different constellations with internal and external partners.

On the theoretical side, most of our work is based on discrete mathematics with fundamental work on sampling grids, mathematical morphology, fuzzy methods, graph-based methods, skeletons, distance functions, and tessellations, in three and more dimensions. One of our PhD theses this year was on image processing on optimal volume sampling lattices.

Several projects deal with light microscopy, developing tools for modern quantitative biology and clinical cancer detection and grading. We are collaborating with local biologists and pathologists as well as with research centers in the US and India. We have close collaboration with the strategic research programme SciLifeLab through which a research platform in quantitative microscopy is formed, 19 of our projects were associated with and partially funded through SciLifeLab. We also have support from the strategic research programme eSSENCE.

On a macroscopic scale, we are working with interactive segmentation and perceptualisation of 3D CT and MR images also including the use of haptics for the interaction. We have developed a segmentation toolbox, WISH, which is publicly available. Applications of this toolbox are, for example, facial surgery planning and measurements of CT wrist images. We are developing methods for rapid segmentation of elongated structures such as vascular systems and airway trees. We have also created a prototype of a system for maxillo-craniofacial surgery planning in which you can see, feel, and manipulate virtual 3D objects as if they were real. This project has obvious synergy with the Human-Computer Interaction research performed within the Vi2 division.

See Section 5 for details on all our research projects. An activity bridging research and education is the supervision of master thesis projects. This year, we completed 16 such projects. In Section 3.1, we present these theses.

For fun, we have collected all the titles of this year's reviewed publications and made a wordcloud from them, to see which words emerge as most important, see Figure 1.

Figure 1: Wordcloud of the journal and reviewed conference proceedings titles. Wordcloud generated with www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/.