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30 updates, newest first · Center for Bioinformatics and Genomics meeting schedule

Dr. Yu-Ping Wang, the PI of the lab, won the Convergence Award. The award is for a Tulane scholar or team of scholars who successfully collaborate across schools, units, and departments to surpass traditional academic disciplines and further the research mission. The awards were presented by Giovanni Piedimonte, Vice President for Research. (https://research.tulane.edu/2022-award-recipients)

Yuntong Bai, a PhD student at the group won two awards at the 2020 SPIE medical imaging conference in Houston, TX.

Yuntong was a Robert F. Wagner Best Student Paper Award Finalists for a paper entitled "An Imaging epigenetics study of Schizophrenia with structure-enforced collaborative regression" and won a honorable mention award for a poster entitled "Integration of multi-task fMRI for cognitive study by structure-enforced collaborative regression".

SPIE Medical Imaging conference is where the latest information is presented by leading researchers in image processing, physics, computer-aided diagnosis, perception, image-guided procedures, biomedical applications, ultrasound, informatics, radiology and digital pathology, with an increased focus on fast emerging areas like deep learning, AI, and machine learning.

Dr. Wang co-organized and chaired an international workshop on Mathematics in Advanced Medical Imaging: Models, Algorithms, and Big Data, from 30 December 2019 -- 3rd January 2020 (http://www.tsimf.cn/meeting/cnshow?id=183) in Sanya, China.

Dr. Wang is appointed as the associate editor for IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging. IEEE TMI is a primary journal in the field of medical imaging, with an impact factor of 7.816.

May 18 marked as a special date for Dr. Wang, who attended Tulane commencement as both a father and professor. He also had a great opportunity to meet keynote speaker, Tim Cook of Apple CEO.

Dr. Wang was invited as a keynote speaker for the 2nd International Symposium on Image Computing and Digital Medicine (ISICDM 2018) on Oct. 13-15, 2018 in Chengdu, China. He gave a talk entitled "Integration of multiscale brain imaging and genomics data with novel mathematical models". He also served as a judge for the competition among 10 Chinese university teams for prostate cancer CT image segmentation challenge using machine learning technology.

Both Erika Chelales and Emma Bortz, got the Tulane BME awards on April 30. They have participated in our NSF EPSCOR project as an undergraduate and gained a lot of research experiences. Kevin Conard presented at the Tulane annual research day at both uptown and downtown medical campus. We are proud of their accomplishments!

Kevin Conrad, a junior working in our lab, is presenting at Tulane School of Sciences and Engineering Research Day on April 12. He is pairing with Alexej Gossmann, a PhD student also in our lab. Thanks NSF EPSCoR support, we have more than a dozen undergraduates working with us on exciting imaging and genomics project!

Two PhD students, Aiying Zhang and Junqi Wang, made two poster presentations at ISBI'18. The postdoc, Dr. Fang Jiang, made two oral presentations. Dr. Wang also organized a special session on the integration of multiscale heterogenous imaging and genomics data with Dr. Vince Calhoun. In addition, Dr. Wang co-chaired the Student Award Committee at the ISBI. Check the newsletter featuring our two poster presentations.

Lab reunion during 2018 SPIE Medical Imaging conference in Houston, Texas. Three PhD students A. Gossmann, Wenxing Hu and Aiying Zhang attended the 2018 SPIE Medical Imaging Conference. They each made an oral presentation on data reuse with machine learning, distance correlation and Bayesian model for imaging genomics data integration, respectively. Dr. Wang also chaired a session in the conference.

Dr. Wang and some PhD students attended Tulane BME 40 years anniversary celebration gala dinner. Both Tulane president, Michael Fitts, and former New Orleans Saints player Steve Gleason delivered an inspirational talk.

From June 25-30, Dr. Wang and the three PhD students (Yuntong Bai, Biao Cai, Aiying Zhang) had a productive meeting at Vancouver, Canada for the annual Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) conference. Each PhD student had a poster presentation on multimodal brain imaging and genomic data fusion, dynamic brain connection network estimation, and the analysis of Schizophrenia brain networks, respectively.

Two papers by Dr. Pascal Zille on the fusion of brain imaging and genomic data, and the estimation of sparse connectivity patterns from fMRI are both accepted within two days by IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, a top journal in medical imaging field. Congratulations on the productive work!

The week of March 5-9 has seen a productive one. We organized a special session on "Integration of multiscale heterogeneous biomedical data" as part of ICASSP'17 in New Orleans, where Dr. Pascal Zille made a presentation on the estimation of brain networks from fMRI. Min Wang also made a poster presentation at ICASSP'17.

Dr. Wang was elected to be the College of Fellows at the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and will be inducted at AIMBE's 2017 Annual Event, March 19-20, 2017, in Washington, DC. According to the AIMBE, college of Fellows represents the most accomplished and distinguished medical and biological engineers responsible for innovation and discovery and Dr. Wang becomes a member of a select group of the top 2% of medical and biological engineering professionals.

Dr. Lynn Nordstrom, the external evaluator of our NSF EPSCoR project, paid a visit to our group and also met some faculty participants. We have a productive meeting, receiving feedback on the implementation of our project.

We wrapped up a productive and fun summer. Dr. Jian Fang went to ISMB'16 in Orlando. Dr. Keith Dillon and PhD student, Wenxing Hu made three presentations at IEEE EMBC'16 in Orlando. Dr. Wang gave a plenary talk on "Integration of neuroimaging, (epi)genomics, networks and biological knowledge", at the third medical image computing workshop on July 16, 2016, in Guangzhou, China.

Lab reunion at Albuquerque! Four of current and past members (Pascal, Dongdong, Jingyao, Owen and Dr. Wang) had a happy reunion while attending SIAM Imaging Sciences meeting in Albuquerque, NM, on May 22. They also had a productive meeting with collaborators from New Mexico and Nebraska as well as NSF EPSCoR External Advisory Committee chaired by Dr. Peter A. Bandettini of NIH at The Mind Research Network (MRN) on May 26, 2016.

Dr. Wang and four PhD students (Alexej, Jian, Shaolong and Wenxing-all have a mathematics degree) have spent a fun afternoon on mathematical modelling with Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the Creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha & the Wolfram Language and the author of A New Kind of Science.

Shaolong successfully defended his PhD thesis on "Unified Sparse Regression Models for Sequence Variants Association Analysis". He becomes the 3rd PhD graduated from MBB. Dr. Wang has also been promoted to full professor at Tulane. Congratulations!

Our lab congratulates the successful defense of Jingyao Li, who become a PhD now! We also welcome the new PhD student, Aiying Zhang and Undergraduates of Emily P Nitzberg and Owen Richfield to join the lab.

Dr. Wang has had a busy travel in China and USA from Oct. 28-Nov. 6; he was invited to give talks at the following three workshops:

1. Shanghai Mini-Workshop on Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics, Tongji University, China, Oct. 25-26, 2015.

2. 3rd International Workshop on Medical Imaging in Suzhou University, China, Oct. 29-30, 2015.

3. 15th Annual Red Raider Mini-Symposium at Department of Mathematics and Statistics of Texas Tech University, Nov. 6-7, 2015.

Two lab members, Alexj Gossman and Shaolong Cao both gave a 25 minutes oral presentation at ACM-BCB in Atlanta. In addition, they both received a travel awards from the conference.

Dr. Wang was also on the conference organization committee, chairing the poster session.

Undated update

On March 10, we had a successful meeting on our annual NSF EPSCoR project with the external advisory committee and evaluator. All four PIs gave an update on the project progress and got feedbacks on the next year's implementation.