"Brown Bag Lunch" Seminar Series Special Guest Dr. Jeffrey Fong

On Wednesday July 11, Dr. Jeffrey Fong, physicist and Project Manager of the Applied & Computational Mathematics Division of the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg MD, USA, visited IT'IS as a guest speaker in the Brown Bag Lunch Seminar series. His presentation was entitled "Uncertainty Quantification Tools for Brain Metrology and an Application to the Multimodal Imaging-Based Detailed Anatomical (MIDA) Head-Neck Model."

The MIDA model, one of the most detailed models of the human head and neck available for computational life sciences, was developed by IT'IS in collaboration with the US Food and Drug Administration.

In his talk, Dr. Fong set out specifically to describe some of the classical tools used for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in magnetic resonance imaging based brain metrology as a complex three-stage problem involving the imaging hardware, concepts of ground truth, and semi-automatic image re-construction by artificial intelligence tools. Dr. Fong applied UQ tools to the MIDA dataset published in 2015 (Iacono, et al., 2015) and concluded that there is quantifiable variability in inter-operator and possibly also intra-operator data interpretation.

Dr. Fong's hearty enthusiasm for the topic of uncertainty made for a very enjoyable presentation!