PhD PROPOSAL

Signal and image processing of 3D high-frequency ultrasound data acquired on

cancerous human lymph nodes

Laboratoire d’Imagerie Paramétrique UMR 7623 CNRS et UPMC

15 Rue de l’école de médecine 75006 Paris

http://www.labos.upmc.fr/lip

Contact : Alain CORON, Alain.Coron@upmc.fr 

Project description: The research activity of the Laboratoire d'Imagerie Paramétrique is

focused on biomedical applications of ultrasound. This PhD thesis is part of a collaborative

 project that involves the laboratories of Riverside Research located in New York, NY, United

States and the Laboratoire d'Imagerie Paramétrique in Paris, France.

Determining the presence or absence of metastases in freshly-excised lymph nodes of patients

with proven primary cancer is crucial for prognosis and treatment planning. Histology is the

gold-standard. However current histopathology standards may miss clinically significant

micrometastases.

The long term goal of this multidisciplinary project is to develop and validate a 3D high-

frequency quantitative ultrasound (QUS) method for reliably determining the presence or 

absence of metastases in freshly-excised lymph nodes. The QUS methods eventually could be

incorporated in a new device to guide pathologists to suspicious regions for definitive

histological evaluation.

From a signal and image processing perspective, developing and validating the QUS method

relies on solving classical signal and image processing problems such as segmentation,

registration and classification. To date, we have acquired and processed 3D high-frequency

radio-frequency (RF) data from more than 400 lymph nodes from more than 250 patients. We

continue to acquire new data and will consider other pathologies. However some of our 

current algorithms require excessively time-consuming human interventions to cope with the

 pace of the new data and are too slow for future clinical use. (Ultimately the methods will

need to be implemented in real-time in the anticipated new pathology device.).

Therefore, the objective of the proposed doctoral research project is to elaborate and validate

more-efficient and robust solutions to process the 3D high-frequency radio-frequency

ultrasound data and the 3D histologic data to establish a useful framework for developing a

reliable new device for detection of small metastases in lymph nodes..

The thesis will be supported by NIH grant CA100183 through a subcontract from Riverside

Research to the Laboratoire d'Imagerie Paramétrique.

Required skills:

• MS degree in image processing or applied mathematics,

• Matlab and C++.

To apply, send to Alain Coron (Alain.Coron@upmc.fr )

• your CV,

• a transcript of your Master grades/marks

• the report you wrote for your Msc thesis or for a previous internship,

Last update: Tuseday, May 29, 2012

 

• reference letters of previous supervisors or teachers,

• a brief description of your research interests highlighting the links between your 

 profile and the thesis topic,

ReferencesA. Coron, J. Mamou, M. Hata, J. Machi, E. Yanagihara, P. Laugier, and E. J. Feleppa, “Three-dimensional segmentation of high-frequency ultrasound echo signals from dissected lymph nodes,” Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium,

 pp. 1370–1373, 2008.A. Coron, J. Mamou, E. Saegusa-Beecroft, M. Hata, P. Lee, J. Machi, E. Yanagihara, P. Laugier, and E. J. Feleppa,

“Assembling 3D histology volumes from sections of cancerous lymph nodes to match 3D high-frequency quantitativeultrasound images,” Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium, pp. 2368–2371, 2010.J. Mamou, A. Coron, M. Hata, J. Machi, E. Yanagihara, P. Laugier, and E. J. Feleppa, “Three-dimensional high-frequency

characterization of cancerous lymph nodes,” Ultrasound Med Biol, vol. 36, pp. 361–375, 2010.J. Mamou, A. Coron, M. L. Oelze, E. Saegusa-Beecroft, M. Hata, P. Lee, J. Machi, E. Yanagihara, P. Laugier, and E. J.Feleppa, “Three-dimensional high-frequency backscatter and enveloppe quantification of cancerous human lymph nodes,”

Ultrasound Med Biol, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 345–57, 2011.A. Coron, J. Mamou, E. Saegusa-Beecroft, M. L. Oelze, T. Yamaguchi, M. Hata, J. Machi, E. Yanagihara, P. Laugier, and E.

J. Feleppa, “A quantitative ultrasound-based method and device for reliably guiding pathologists to metastatic regions of dissected lymph nodes,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, pp. 1064-1067, 2012.

Keywords: PhD Thesis proposal, image and signal processing, high-frequency ultrasound,

cancer, quantitative ultrasound, applied mathematics, segmentation, registration, machine

learning, classification, Matlab, C++.

Last update: Tuseday, May 29, 2012