Biros' brain research featured by NSF and others

The Oct. 12 National Science Foundation news site featured brain research by ICES Professor George Biros.

The story chronicles Biros' work over nearly a decade to create accurate and efficient computing algorithms that can characterize gliomas, the most common and aggressive type of primary brain tumor. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) provided the computing resources to power his latest work.

Biros, professor of mechanical engineering and leader of the ICES Parallel Algorithms for Data Analysis and Simulation Group, this year (2017) presented results of a new, fully automatic method that combines biophysical models of tumor growth with machine learning algorithms for the analysis of Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging data of glioma patients. All the components of the new method were enabled by supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

"Our goal is to take an image and delineate it automatically and identify different types of abnormal tissue – edema, enhancing tumor (areas with very aggressive tumors), and necrotic tissue," said Biros. "It's similar to taking a picture of one's family and doing facial recognition to identify each member, but here you do tissue recognition, and all this has to be done automatically."

In addition, Health Data Management, R&D Magazine and the International Business Times have all covered the story in recent days.