The Department would like to recognize Dinggang Shen, PhD, for receiving new five-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 funding as MPI ($1.16M) in July 2017 through a subcontract with Houston Methodist Research Institute for his project, “Learning-Based Personalized Craniomaxillofacial Surgical Planning.” The project’s goal is to improve the ability to develop a new learning-based surgical approach to planning craniomaxillofacial (CMF) surgeries.
The Department would also like to recognize Dr. Shen for being awarded four-year NIH R01 renewal funding ($1.82M) in September 2017 for his project entitled, “Development of Robust Brain Measurement Tools Informed by Ultrahigh Field 7T MRI.” This 3rd-phase renewal project aims to develop a set of novel learning-based methods to transfer image contrast and tissue/anatomical labels of 7T MRI of training subjects to 3T MRI of new subjects for: 1) image quality enhancement; 2) high-precision tissue segmentation; 3) accurate anatomical region of interest (ROI) labeling; and eventually 4) early detection of brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).
Dr. Shen noted: “These two awards allow us to continuously work on two different areas — dental surgical planning and neuroimaging studies. We appreciate strong supports from both the Department of Radiology and BRIC, as well as the co-investigators of these two awards — Dr. Li Wang (Radiology), Dr. Daniel Kaufer (Neurology), Dr. Yufeng Liu (Statistics and Operations Research), Dr. Keith Smith (Radiology), and Dr. Pew-Thian Yap (Radiology).”