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                   B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y
                      Computer Science Department
                          C O L L O Q U I U M
                       Wednesday, Oct 17, 3:00 PM
                       (Coffee served at 2:45PM)
                         Seminar Room / MCS 135

                   CS  Faculty Research Overviews

                             Gene Itkis
                     "Why Applied Cryptography"

		            Margrit Betke
                    "An Overview of Research Topics on
                     Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Lung Cancer"

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Gene Itkis:

Security claims of any real system always rely on some security assumptions.
Serious considerations of these assumptions and consequences can be quite
depressing - often they are broken by a simple virus infection. On the other
extreme, people often tend to treat security as luxury.
To coop with this situation, I will try to define precise notions of
comparative security, and apply these for some "light security" solutions. I
will also describe some attempts to push the envelop of the assumptions. The
presentation will mention a number of my projects with students, including
some recent work with Prof. John Byers.


Margrit Betke:

Chest computed tomography (CT) has become a well-established means of
diagnosing pulmonary metastasis of oncology patients and evaluating
response to treatment.  Since diagnosis and prognosis of cancer
generally depend upon growth assessment, repeated CT studies are used
to determine growth rates of pulmonary nodules.  CT is also being
investigated as a method for screening patients at high risk for
primary lung cancer. The long-term objective of our project is to offer
the radiologist a fully automated computer vision system that detects and
compares pulmonary nodules in repeated CT studies.  Such a system would
provide a quantitative and efficient tool for the radiologist to analyze
CT scans and may therefore impact patients' treatment regimen.
I will discuss several research topics that my group is working on,
describe our current prototype system, and present some recent results
on lung registration.