Nagle Lecture Series

2001 Nagle Lecture

F. A. Grünbaum
Mathematics in Medical Imaging: the Present and the Future
November 1, 2001

Description of the Talk

The advent of Computerized Tomography (CAT) and other techniques like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has had a profound impact in diagnostic medicine and is starting to play an important role in an interventionist mode for the early treatment of strokes, aneurysms, etc. I will try to describe some of the successful applications of mathematics, physics and engineering that have made this possible and I will look into some of the developments that lie ahead. The intended areas of applications for these new modalities are repeated mammographies and monitoring in a neonatal clinic. There are problems in mathematics and physics that need to be overcome before one can get these products into a hospital and I want to give a basic description of some of these challenges.

Description of the Speaker

F. Alberto Grünbaum is a Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley. A graduate of The Rockefeller University, NYC, he has taught at NYU and Caltech, and has been a visiting scientist at the IBM Watson Research Center in NY. He is interested in the interaction between new mathematical developments and a host of imaging problems in areas including medical imaging, geophysics, radar detection, etc. He has served as Chair of the Mathematics Department and as Director of the Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics, both at Berkeley. He has been a Miller Professor, and is presently the Editor of the journal Inverse Problems, a publication of the Institute of Physics in England. He is a corresponding member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias, Cordoba, Argentina.