: The International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) is a forum for researchers particularly interested in the computational and modeling aspects of biomedical imaging. The focus emphasizes methodologies that have the potential to be applicable to multiple imaging modalities and to imaging at different scales. Topics include physical, biological and statistical modeling of biological and anatomical structures, image formation and reconstruction, computational image analysis, statistical image analysis, visualization, and image quality assessment. The meeting aims to facilitate cross-fertilization of methodologies between different imaging modalities and scales, with applications ranging from the nano, molecular and cellular levels through small-animal imaging and macroscopic to whole-body clinical systems. Whereas many medical imaging meetings focus on particular modalities, ISBI includes methodologies applied to biological and anatomical imaging modalities, either emerging or well established. Imaging applications of interest include gene expression mapping, drug discovery and delivery, molecular imaging, functional brain mapping, computational neuro-anatomy, cardiovascular imaging, and cancer imaging. A principal goal of the ? ISBI conference is to connect methodologies with important medical and biomedical applications, from ? microscopic to macroscopic scales. ISBI 2008, to be held May 14th -17th, is the fifth in a series cosponsored by two IEEE societies: the Signal Processing Society (SPS) and the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). The inaugural ISBI meeting was held in July 2002 and subsequent ones in April 2004, 2006 and 2007. With over 500 attendees, the 2002 meeting featured opening addresses from Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director of NIH, and Dr. Roderic I. Pettigrew, Director of NIBIB. The success of the previous ISBI meetings bodes well for the future of ISBI. However, the success of this field relies on training young investigators to work with state-of-the-art sophisticated computational or modeling tools and on informing the researcher community of the latest progress in medical imaging protocols and modalities. In addition, the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the biomedical imaging field means that no single professional organization has the majority of potential participants as its members. In this context, the tutorials series, covering very diverse topics and offered on the first day of the conference, is an important component, which has been very popular in the past occurrences. This proposal requests funds to provide passes for US-based students and post-doctoral fellows to attend the tutorials. We will also encourage participation by new investigators (US graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty who completed their PhD less than 5 years ago) by providing travel stipends to present contributed papers. ? ?
STATEMENT (provided by applicant): The topics of this conference are advanced imaging methods and technologies that have the potential to improve patient diagnosis and treatment in future medical devices and software. ? ? ?
