Biography
Zhengwang Wu, PhD, is a Research Instructor in the Department of Radiology at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is an expert in computational anatomy, specializing in designing and developing algorithms and toolkits for quantitatively analyzing brain MR images, especially infant brain MR images. His research interests include a) understanding and modeling the early brain development from the structure and function aspects, b) developing algorithms for automatically quantifying the brain morphometry; c) developing algorithms for identifying imaging biomarkers for early diagnosis of brain disorders and neurodegeneration diseases.
Dr. Wu is fascinated to understanding the brain and its development. He is very interested in understanding what mechanisms lead to memory, emotion, intelligence, and high-level cognitive abilities in the human brain. He hopes to build a model to reveal knowledge gaps in this field.
Brain MR imaging is a non-invasive and in-vivo strategy for studying brain structure and function. However, the raw images need to be segmented, reconstructed, and visualized to reflect the brain’s characteristics. These steps involve many technical challenges, especially when handling the infant brain MR images due to the quick brain expansion and neuron maturation because accurate brain morphology measurements and their relationship to brain function are crucial for understanding how the brain develops and functions, the computational algorithms, and tools are therefore demanded by the community..
Expertise
Expert in developing cutting-edge techniques to quantitatively analyze brain morphology in structure and modeling their relationships with brain function. His work mainly focuses on mapping brain function and revealing brain development trajectories.
Research
One major motivation for studying brain development is establishing a normal brain development trajectory for identifying abnormal brain development. However, to build this trajectory, we need accurate brain measurements from both structural and functional perspectives. The raw brain observations can be acquired with an MR scanner; However, the MR images need to be computed to get the actual measurements that psychiatrists or neurologists are interested in. His research is to develop and implement automatic and professional tools to make this computation can be easily conducted by psychiatrists or neurologists.
From the analysis viewpoint, with the automatic MR imaging computation tools, psychiatrists or neurologists can quantitatively analyze their local data, reducing costs and accelerating the analysis procedure.
From the brain understanding viewpoint, with the modeled normal brain development trajectory, abnormal brain development can be diagnosed at the early stage and therefore lead to early medical intervention, which will enable the patient to acquire timely treatment.
Education
- Doctorate: Xi’an Jiaotong University (Xi’an, China)
- Postdoctoral Fellow: University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC)
- Postdoctoral Research Associate: University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, NC
Publications
To view a list of Dr. Wu’s publications, click here.
