P. Thomas Fletcher, USTAR assistant professor in the School of Computing and a faculty member of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, recently received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to develop nonlinear statistical models and classification procedures for time-varying shape and apply them to biomedical image analysis problems. His goal is to help researchers understand processes that change the shape of anatomy.
For example, neuroscientists studying the development of the infant brain would want to know how neurodevelopment is different in healthy children versus children with autism. One of the challenges in modeling shape and shape variations is that they are highly nonlinear and high-dimension, so that standard linear statistics do not apply. Therefore, the ability to model and understand changes in shape depend on the development of new regression models for data in nonlinear spaces.
Fletcher’s research focuses on solving problems in medical image analysis and computer vision through the combination of statistics and differential geometry.
Learn more about Fletcher’s research.