Nick Tustison

biography

After spending my early graduate years researching quantitative techniques for analyzing hyperpolarized gas lung images near the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains, I gave up the glamour, wealth, and prestige I had earned at the University of Virginia to forge new paths in cardiac imaging research in the Midwest. Working with Dr. Amir Amini at Washington University in St. Louis, I created a new deformable registration framework for analyzing myocardial kinematics using tagged MRI and B-splines. Although the mountain biking was unexpectedly superb (I lived about 5 miles from Chubb Trail) and fried ravioli is better than it sounds, the need for postdocs in Jim Gee's lab and the attraction of the East Coast lured me to the City of Brotherly Love (an ostensible contradiction for any of its denizens). After promising to do odd jobs around his home in addition to my normal research duties, Jim acquiesced to my pleas for more permanent employment. Currently, I find myself in the rat race euphemistically labeled 'academia' where I continue to manipulate arrays of numbers that have medical relevance (Ambiguous, I know. Specific projects are listed below.). I maintain my sanity by running (Fairmount Park is a favorite locale), reading non-fiction (philosophy, history, etc.), and enjoying my recent conversion to the gospel of Steve Jobs.

projects

• FEM B-spline image registration
• Generalized B-spline approximation and interpolation
• Graph cut-based segmentation
• Translational work and the Insight Toolkit

publications