speakers and Mentors

Agma Traina - Tenured Professor, USP

Dr. Traina is a Professor with the Computer Science Department of the Mathematics and Computer Science Institute at the University of São Paulo at São Carlos. She received her PhD in Computational Physics from the University of São Paulo at São Carlos, Brazil. She got her BSc and MSc in Computer Science from the Mathematics and Computer Science Institute at the University of São Paulo at São Carlos. Her research interests ranges from complex data indexing and retrieval by content, similarity queries to data visualization and visual data mining. She has focused her research on medical applications supported by image processing techniques. Over the years, she has supervised over 40 Graduate students in these areas, and published more than 250 papers in journals and conferences. She is a member of the Brazilian Computer Society, ACM and IEEE Computer Society.

Carlos Garrido - Tenured Professor, USP

Dr. Garrido has a B.Sc. in Nuclear Engineering at the “Instituto Superior de Ciencias y Tecnologias Nucleares” (1996) and Ph.D. in Physics at USP (2005), where he is currently a professor. He has expertise in Biomedical Engineering with emphasis in the processing of biological signals. He acts mainly in the follow areas: development and application of quantitative methodologies for the diagnosis and the study of neurodegenerative diseases from MRI. The major emphasis is currently on the techniques of localized spectroscopy (1H and 31P), magnetization transfer, volumetry and relaxometry applied in the studies of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis and Alzheimer's. To that end, his group has full support of researchers from the Hospital das Clinicas of Ribeirão Preto, with whom he maintain a close interaction and where currently two MRI machines of 1.5 T and 3.0 T are installed.

David Gobbi - Senior Software Architect, CIPAC

Dr. Gobbi is a research scientist and Chief Senior Software Architect at the Calgary Image Processing and Analysis Centre (CIPAC). He holds an MSc in Physics from Carleton University in Ottawa (1997) and a PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Western Ontario (2003). He has experience in developing both academic and commercial software for medical neuroimaging analysis. He is one of the core developers of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and has been recognized for his contributions to open-source software. Dr. Gobbi primary interest is image-guided therapy, specifically the application of multi-modal imaging to neurosurgery, though he has a diverse background that includes work in radiotherapy, x-ray detector development, medical image registration, MRI, and intra-operative 3D ultrasound. In addition to his academic work, which includes working as a Research Associate in the School of Computing at Queen's University in Kingston, he co-founded and managed a software company (Atamai Inc.) full-time for five years in London, Ontario.

Letícia Rittner - Tenured Professor, UNICAMP

Dr. Rittner is a Professor at Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation (DCA), School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (FEEC), University of Campinas (UNICAMP). Her research group is part of the Medical Image Computing Lab. She has a B.Eng. (Electrical Engineering, 1993) from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). After 7 years in the industry and an MBA at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), she returned to UNICAMP, where she completed both a MSc (2004) and a PhD (2009), with a 6-month internship at the McConnell Brain Imaging Center (BIC), Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Canada. Her thesis research focused on segmentation methods for diffusion tensor imaging. She spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Medical Imaging Processing Group (MIPG), Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania (2012-2013). Some of Dr Rittner's recent papers are on automatic Corpus Callosum parcellation and characterization in DTI and on brain white matter lesions detection and classification.

Mariana Bento - Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Calgary

Dr. Bento currently is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Calgary Image Processing and Analysis Centre, University of Calgary (CIPAC). She holds the Donald Burns and Louise Berlin Postdoctoral Fellowship in Dementia Research from the Hotchkiss Brain Institute. She did her MSc and PhD at UNICAMP. She is an expert in texture analysis using both handcrafted and convolutional features. During her PhD she developed an automatic tool for segmenting white-matter lesions. She is one of the BrainHack chairs responsible for managing and sharing the data that will be used in the MR image analysis (segmentation) BrainHack. She is currently working on getting manual annotation of the images, which is both time consuming and very precious for developing data-driven image analysis approaches.

Marina Salluzzi - CIPAC Manager

Dr. Salluzzi is an image scientist and the Manager of CIPAC. She holds a B.Sc. from the Universidad Nacional de Entre Rios, Argentina, and an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary. She handles account and data management and all administration allowing the Seaman Family MR Centre to maintain a complete set of services for the research programs that it serves and collaborates with. In conjunction with the Seaman Family Centre IT team, Dr. Salluzzi also manages medical imaging data and imaging databases at CIPAC. Her experience and knowledge in multiple disciplines uniquely qualifies her to assist students, researchers, and administrators alike.

Matthew Brown - University of Alberta

Dr. Brown did his B.Sc. in Neuroscience at the University of Alberta (2001) and Ph.D. also in Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario (2007). He is an adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Science and research associate of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Alberta. He has held grants from the major Canadian funding agencies. He has more than 30 journal publications in prestigious journals, such as NeuroImage. Dr. Brown founded the Puzzle Rock Coding Inc., which is a company for software and data analysis consulting and software development. His major research interests are diagnostic and prognostic clinical tools for mental illness based on combining MRI and fMRI brain scanning with machine learning.

Nils Forkert - Assistant Professor - University of Calgary

Dr. Forkert did his BSc in Computer Science at at the University of Hamburg (2009) and his Ph.D. in medical physics at University of Technology (2013). He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. He has participated in 14 successful grant application and was author or co-author in more than 80 journal publications. The focus of his research is to develop and evaluate new image processing methods, algorithms and software tools for the analysis of medical images. This includes the image-based extraction of clinically relevant parameters and biomarkers describing the morphology and function of organs. In doing so, he aims to support clinical studies and preclinical research as well as developing and improving computer-aided diagnosis and patient-specific prediction models with a special focus on, but not limited to, the human brain.

Ricardo Ferrari - Associate Professor - UFSCar

Dr. Ferrari is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing (DC) at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). He holds BSc. (Dec/1995), MSc (Mar/1998) and Ph.D. (Mar/2002) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of São Paulo (USP - São Carlos) with specialization in Medical Image Processing. Dr. Ferrari has also conducted two postdoctoral degrees: the first one at the Seaman Family MR Research Center (Calgary-Canada, 2003) and the second at Sunnybrook Hospital (Toronto-Canada, 2007). Previously to join the UFSCar, he worked as a research engineer for several years in Canada. His researches are in the areas of multidimensional signal processing, statistical modeling, machine learning, computer vision, and pattern recognition. Applications include systems to aid early diagnosis of degenerative brain diseases and dynamic analysis of cells in intravital microscopy images.

Richard Frayne - Deputy Director Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary

Dr Richard Frayne, is a Professor (with tenure) in the Departments of Radiology and Clinical Neuroscience, a member of the Seaman Family MR Centre (SFC) at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary. He is also the Deputy Director of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI), Foothills Medical Centre, Alberta Health Services. Previously he was Scientific Director of the SFC. From 2003-2013, he was a Canada Research Chair in Image Sciences and, in 2010, he was appointed to the Hopewell Professorship in Brain Imaging. Dr Frayne has >20 years of experience in imaging research in a clinical research environment and has >160 published peer-reviewed publications, >115 invited talks and >500 scholarly presentations. In addition, he has 20 international patents and has had technology successfully licensed (estimated commercial value >$100M). His research interests are in the development and application of new human imaging techniques for the study, detection and treatment of neurovascular disease. Current specific interests include angiography, stroke and small vessel disease, and applications of these and other imaging techniques to human clinical trials. The impact of his research can be measured not only through traditional measures of scholarly output (>7,900 citations, 15 papers have >100 citations; Google Scholar) but by impact on patient care. His expertise in clinical translation of imaging techniques is well recognized, including Calgary-based work in moving magnetic resonance (MR) imaging from 1.5 T to 3 T.

Roberto Lotufo - Professor, UNICAMP

Dr. Lotufo received his B.Sc. degree from Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, Brazil, in 1978 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Bristol, Bristol, U.K., in 1990. Since 1981, he has been with the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), São Paulo, Brazil, where he is currently a Full Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His principal research interests are in the areas of image processing and analysis, pattern recognition, and machine learning. Prof. Lotufo has authored or coauthored over 150 refereed international journal and full conference papers. Prof. Lotufo was a recipient of the Innovation Personality in 2008 and the Zeferino Vaz Academic Recognition in 2011 from the University of Campinas. He is a founder partner and Chief Technology Officer of the Neural Mind start-up company focused on developing solutions using Deep Learning (NeuralMind).

Roberto Souza - Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Calgary

Dr. Souza is a dual citizen from Brazil and the United States currently completing a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Seaman Family MR Centre in Calgary. He has a B.Sc. in electrical engineering at the Federal University of Pará, a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer engineering at UNICAMP. In 2018 he was awarded the T. Chen Fong postdoctoral fellowship in medical imaging science. He has international experience having worked as an intern at the Grenoble Institute of Technology, France, and the University of Pennsylvania, United States. Dr. Souza has extensive expertise in image processing and machine learning. He has previously offered similar machine learning workshops and is a defender of sharing public data and code. He is the manager and conceiver of the Calgary-Campinas-359 dataset.

Sandra Avila - Assistant Professor, UNICAMP

Dr. Avila is an Assistant Professor and Research Scientist in the Institute of Computing at UNICAMP. She is also a faculty member of the RECOD Lab (REasoning for COmplex Data). She has a B.Sc. in computer science from the Federal University of Sergipe and a Ph.D. from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Her research interests are machine learning, computer vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. She was a member of the team that won the Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection challenge at the 2017 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging.