Medical Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2007

Mentor: Ron Peshock
Department: Radiology
Room number: CS0.404
Mail Code: 8896
Phone number: x89605
E-mail: ron.peshock@utsouthwestern.edu
Project title: Automated assessment of pulmonary fibrosis from CT scans

Human subjects IRB approved project number (where applicable): n/a

Animal subjects IRB approved project number (where applicable): n/a

Project Type: Basic

Brief Description of Project:

Automated assessment of pulmonary fibrosis from CT scans

Drs. Roderick McColl, Christine Garcia and Ron Peshock

Parenchymal lung diseases such as sarcoidosis, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and emphysema produce serious disabling illnesses. With new therapies it is increasingly important to develop methods to quantitatively track the progression and response to therapy. Recently, methods have been described using adaptive multiple feature extraction to track textural features in CT scans of the lung in patients with pulmonary disease. In this project we will develop computer techniques to (1) reproducibly select lung regions from CT scans and (2) perform automatic tissue typing on a regional basis. These techniques will then be used to examine the prevalence of early lung disease in the Dallas Heart Study cohort.

Previous Research Activities or Publications with Medical Students:

Chris Maroules 06-07 Accelerated imaging of the heart and atherosclerosis at 3T Doris Duke Research Fellowship
Rajiv Shah 03-04 Aortic pulse wave velocity using MRI
Hao Lo 03-04 Abdominal and coronary atherosclerosis using MRI Doris Duke Research Fellowship

Return to Medical Student Research Page