Summary of research

The objective of CBA is to carry out research and education in computerised image analysis and perceptualisation. We are pursuing this objective through a large number of research projects, ranging from fundamental mathematical methods development, to application-tailored development and testing, the latter mainly in biomedicine and forest industry. We are also developing new methods for perceptualisation, combining computer graphics, haptics, and image processing. Our research is organised in many projects of varying size, ranging in effort from a few person months to several person years. There is a lot of interaction between different researchers; generally, a person is involved in several different projects in different constellations with internal and external partners. In this context, the affiliation to UU or SLU of the particular researchers seldom has been of importance over the years.

On the theoretical side, most of our work is based on discrete mathematics with fundamental work on sampling grids, mathematical morphology, fuzzy methods, graph-based methods, skeletons, distance functions, and tessellations, in three and more dimensions.

Several projects deal with light microscopy, developing tools for modern quantitative biology and clinical cancer detection and grading. We are collaborating with local biologists and pathologists, research centers in the US and India, and a Danish company. We have close collaboration with the strategic research programmes SciLifeLab (and also eSSENCE) through which a research platform in quantitative microscopy is formed.

Another example of modality we work with is electron microscopy (EM). One application is focused on finding viruses in EM images. Since the texture of the virus particles is an important feature in identification of the different virus types, this project has also led to basic research on texture analysis.

New techniques are creating 3D images on microscopic scales. We have been analyzing EM tomography images of protein molecules for several years. Another technique is X-ray microtomography; we are developing methods to use such images to study the internal structure of paper, wood fibre composites as well as bone.

On a macroscopic scale, we are working with interactive segmentation of 3D CT and MR images by use of haptics. We have developed a segmentation toolbox, WISH, which is publicly available. Applications of this toolbox are, for example, facial surgery planning and measurements of CT wrist images.

Over the last several years, we have activities in perceptualisation under leadership of Guest Professor Ingrid Carlbom, with the goal of creating a commercial system for maxillo-cranio-facial surgery planning in which you can see, feel, and manipulate virtual 3D objects as if they were real. We have created a unique haptic system where virtual objects can be grabbed and manipulated. This project has obvious synergy with the Human-Computer Interaction research performed within the division.

See Section 5 for details on all our research projects.

An activity bridging research and education is the supervision of master thesis projects. This year, we completed 13 such projects. In Section 3.2, we present these theses.