The principal investigator, Dr. Raicu, has been involved in an REU site at Oakland University, Michigan, in 2002. Since then, along with the co-PI, she has mentored several undergraduate and graduate students; two of her female undergraduate students received Computing Research Association National Honor Mentions for excellence in doing undergraduate research at CDM in 2003 and participated in the Computing Research Program’s Distributed Mentor Project in 2003 and 2004. Additionally, she is the faculty advisor for the student chapter of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) honor society, a chapter which she initiated in May 2003 and is the largest chapter of UPE with over 800 members. Dr. Raicu has also initiated a weekly seminar for undergraduates interested in working on Visual Computing research. She is the principal investigator on a Departmental Initiative Grant to create and manage a viable computer vision curriculum at DePaul University, on a Medical Imaging Research Grant, and on a homeland security research grant from Argonne National Labs. Along with the co-PI, she directs the Intelligent Multimedia Processing (IMP) Lab and the Medical Imaging Laboratory. Dr. Raicu has conducted significant previous research work in intelligent multimedia retrieval.
Dr. Furst has worked extensively with undergraduate students doing research as part of his involvement with both the American Sign Language project and the Medical Imaging project at CDM. He is also the CDM representative for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Fair “Science Day”, an event for undergraduate students to present their preliminary research results to their colleagues and faculty. Each year since 2002, both Drs. Raicu and Furst have been awarded grants by the DePaul University Undergraduate Research Assistant Program and the School of CDM to support undergraduate research; they are actively mentoring four undergraduate students under this grant. Furthermore, under their research supervision, their undergraduate students are authors or co-authors of several publications and posters in the field of medical informatics. Dr. Furst is also a co-PI on the Departmental Initiative Grant, the Medical Imaging Research Grant, and the homeland security research grant from Argonne National Labs; he co-directs the Intelligent Multimedia Processing Lab and the Medical Imaging Lab. Dr. Furst has extensive expertise in the general field of medical image processing.
Dr. Armato is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology, the Committee on Medical Physics, and The College at The University of Chicago. His current research focus is in the field of computer-aided diagnosis, which combines the disciplines of physics, mathematics, computer science, and statistics to analyze medical images for the early detection and diagnosis of disease. Dr. Armato received his undergraduate degree in physics from The University of Chicago in 1987 and earned a Ph.D. in medical physics from The University of Chicago in 1997. Since that time, he has gained national recognition for his work in computer-aided diagnosis. Dr. Armato is the author or co-author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and abstracts, and he has been an invited speaker at a variety of national and international scientific meetings. His work includes the development of computerized techniques to automatically identify lung cancer in computed tomography (CT) scans and to assist with the measurement of mesothelioma tumor thickness in CT scans. In 2002 he was awarded the Kurt Rossmann Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Department of Radiology. He is a member of the Lung Image Database Consortium Steering Committee of the National Cancer Institute, and he has been a member of The University of Chicago Cancer Research Center since 2001.
