Friday April 25th, 2003
NEUROINFORMATICS 2003
Symposium Co-Chairs
David A. Rottenberg, M.Sc. (Cantab), M.D.
Professor of Neurology and Radiology, University of Minnesota and
Director, International Neuroimaging Consortium
Dr. Rottenberg directs the International Neuroimaging Consortium (INC), which has been funded by a Human Brain Project grant from the National Institute of Mental Health since 1993. INC brings together neuroscientists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists and health informatics specialists in four U.S. and two foreign institutions: the University of Minnesota, the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, Florida State University, UCLA, the Research Institute of Brain and Blood Vessels (Akita, Japan) and the Technical University of Denmark (Lyngby, Denmark). The focus of INC research is modeling and visualization of spatial and temporal patterns of functional activation in the living human brain, and by virtue of the participation of junior and senior faculty at three leading academic MRI/fMRI centers, the consortium provides a unique resource for the study of functional neuroimages acquired during rigorously standardized neurobehavioral protocols using 1.5T, 3T, 4T, and 7T fMRI.
Dr. Rottenberg is a Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded Focused Research Group (FRG) Computational Conformal Mapping and Scientific Visualization, which includes pure and computational mathematicians and neuroscientists at three US institutions: the University of Minnesota, Florida State University, and the University of Tennessee. The aim of the FRG is to produce and improve implementations of discrete conformal mapping for multidisciplinary use within mathematics itself, where a complex analysis is being reinvigorated by new discrete techniques, and in the larger scientific context of analysis and visualization of neuroscientific data.
Lael C. Gatewood, Ph.D.
Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Minnesota and
Director, NLM Training Program in Medical Informatics
Dr. Gatewood is Director of the Neuroinformatics Core for the International Neuroimaging Consortium (INC). She supervises outreach activities for the collaboratory, including the Website, interactive demonstrations, tutorial presentations and conference coordination. In addition, she co-directs a major National Library of Medicine (NLM) training grant in medical informatics, one of the first programs in the field now in its 28th year of NIH funding. This program provides informatics research opportunities, graduate programs and computer resources for medical and graduate students, health professionals and postdoctoral fellows. She has been active in clinical research and its information systems support for the past 30 years. Other research interests include regional immunization registries, integration of public health recording systems and other applications of public health informatics.
She was previously Director of the National Micropopulation Simulation Resource (NMSR), funded by NIH (National Center for Research Resources) 1983-1998 to promote the use of Monte Carlo and micropopulation models in biomedical research. The NMSR center was unique in that it explored micropopulations of interest to epidemiologists, demographers and those in health services research. In micropopulation simulations, each subject can have a different timecourse for discrete events, which allows analysis of natural disease patterns, prevention and/or interventions over a period of time. It was possible to assemble a population with known genetic characteristics against which to test new methods of genetic analysis, as in linkage or segregation studies. The models were used to simulate population patterns of infectious disease as well as to study chronic diseases such as heart attack, stroke, cancer, arthritis, diabetes. These studies helped scientists understand how disease traits spread through generations, new methods of primary/secondary prevention and the role of risk-factor exposures, such as smoking or diet. Other studies included the complex pattern of intravenous drug use and HIV infection, as well as the efficacy of treatments in a simulated closed population in high-risk areas. Similar models helped to evaluate patterns of influenza nfection and vaccine efficacy in confined populations such as nursing home residents and children in day-care centers.