Abstract
The human brain is fantastic at recognising people and objects and building an understanding of the natural world around us. However, the visual cortex is not ideal at objectively measuring what we see and complex spatial patterns hidden in plain sight cannot sometimes be deciphered by the naked eye. Computational Pathology is an emerging discipline concerned with the study of computer algorithms for understanding disease from the analysis of digitised histology images. I will show some snippets of computational pathology research in my group to demonstrate the value of analytics of information-rich, high-resolution whole-slide images (WSIs, the so-called Big Cancer Image Data) for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. I will show examples of how histological motifs extracted from digital pathology image data are likely to lead to patient stratification for precision medicine. I will then discuss some of the main challenges in digital pathology and opportunities for exploring new unchartered territories.
Biography
Nasir Rajpoot is Professor in Computer Science at the University of Warwick, where started his academic career as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in 2001. He also holds an Honorary Scientist position at the Department of Pathology, University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust since 2016.
Prof Rajpoot is the founding Head of Tissue Image Anayltics lab (formerly known as the BioImage Analysis or BIA lab) at Warwick since 2012. Current focus of research in his lab is on developing algorithms for the analysis of large multi-gigapixel digital pathology images, with applications to computer-assisted grading of cancer and image-based markers for prediction of cancer progression and survival.
Prof Rajpoot has been active in the digital pathology community for almost a decade now, having co-chaired several meetings in the histology image analysis (HIMA) series since 2008 and served as a founding PC member of the SPIE Digital Pathology meeting since 2012. He will be chairing the European Congress on Digital Pathology (ECDP) at Warwick in 2019. He was the General Chair of the UK Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA) conference in 2010, and the Technical Chair of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) in 2007. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and member of the ACM, the British Association of Cancer Research (BACR), and the European Association of Cancer Research (EACR).