Dr. Youssef Qranfal has served as Professor of Applied Mathematics at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts since September 2015. His recent research focuses on optimization, operation research, statistics, and their applications. Prior to starting his career at WIT, Dr. Qranfal has worked in industry as an engineer in applied mathematics and computer science. He has authored many technical papers on applied mathematics to various fields such as medical imaging. They have been published in peer-reviewed journals, presented at technical conferences, and appeared in the proceedings of those conferences.
Images and visualization have become increasingly important in many areas of science and technology. Advances in hardware and software have allowed computerized image processing to become a standard tool in many scientific applications, including medical imaging. In this talk, Dr. Qranfal demonstrated how he models and solves the inverse problem of reconstructing a dynamic medical image where the signal strength changes substantially over the time required for data acquisition. His group uses a stochastic approach based on a Markov process to model the problem. Dr. Qranfal and his collaborators introduced a novel proximal approach and applied it during the Kalman filter algorithm to ensure positivity and spatial regularization. They have tested their method for the case of image reconstruction in time-dependent single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). According to Dr. Qranfal, numerical results corroborate the effectiveness of his approach.
