Month: May 2010

Dear all,

The last weekend in May was busy and beautiful at the Queen’s School of Computing.

On Friday, the School held a Research Showcase event. Faculty members, representing various research projects in the School, were featured speakers:

• Software Technology: Juergen Dingel
• Biomedical Computing: Randy Ellis and James Stewart
• Wireless Networks: Hossam Hassanein
• Human Computer Interaction: Roel Vertegaal and Doug Wightman.

On Saturday, the School’s labs traveled to Ban Righ Hall where displays, experiments and demos where presented to the alumni. On hand were the School’s ever dependable and characteristically enthusiastic volunteers: Mervat AbuElkheir, Andrew Dickerson, Ed Kouch, Manuela Kunz, John Lee, Dumitru Oceanu, Mahmoud Ouda, Cheryl Savery, and Kathrin Tyryshkin.

Thanks to Dean Mckeown for organizing these two events. And to our amazing School staff, a cheerful nod of appreciation for going way, way beyond the call of duty (nothing new here): Tom Bradshaw, Dave Dove, Irene LaFleche, and Lynda Moulton.

On Sunday, a new tradition was born with the launch of the First Annual Queen’s Graduate Computing Society Conference, a conference organized by the School’s graduate students for graduate students. The event included oral presentations and poster exhibits by the graduate students, as well as keynote talks by Randy Ellis, Jim Cordy, and yours truly. After a full day, and a rich technical program, awards were presented for the best presentation in each of two tracks (Abdulrahman Abahsain and Sara Salehi) and the best poster (Ed Kouch). A tip of the hat for the superbly organized conference to: Sharief Oteafy, Dumitru Oceanu, Layan Nahlawi, Sunny Gupta, Karolina Zurowska, Gehan Selim, Imad Abdallah and Katie Legere.

Sum ergo computo,
Selim

Dear all,

Lauren Gordon, LISC undergrad in the PerkLab won the “Best Undergraduate Poster Award” for her CISC-499 project at the “5th Canadian Student Conference on Biomedical Computing and Engineering“, May 20-22, 2010, Waterloo, Canada. The conference website is:

Title: Reconstruction of Needle Tracts from Fluoroscopy in Prostate Brachytherapy
Authors: Lauren E. Gordon(a), Ehsan Dehghan(a), Septimiu E. Salducean(b) and Gabor Fichtinger(a)

(a) Queen’s University (b) University of British Columbia

The award committee provided the following summary:

Ms. Gordon presented her project with her colleagues at Queen’s University, reporting an interesting method to recover needle paths in prostate brachytherapy to update dosimetry plan during brachytherapy therapies. Ms. Gordon has shown her good understanding of clinical background and related methods of the study, hinting the significant effort she put in literature search and reading. The reviewers particularly found it pleasant that Ms. Gordon admitted the limitation of the study and turn it to a constructive discussion with the reviewer. We found such style of interaction pleasant and good attitude in poster presentation. The poster was easy to follow, and the objective of the study, the study design, and its results were perfectly correlated, which were not the always the case in other posters. We congratulate Ms. Gordon’s successful undergraduate study, and looking forward to see her continued study in this area of research.

Congratulations Lauren and best wishes,
Selim

Ahmed Hassan and Bram Adams, professors in the School of Computing, have received funding under NSERC’s (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Interaction Grants Program. Their research includes examining problems facing software practice and making suggestions to help developers avoid bugs. With the grant, Drs. Hassan and Adams and their teams plan to demonstrate their latest work for SAP software developers in Vancouver. Their goal is to start a long-term collaboration with SAP, the largest software enterprise in Europe and the fourth largest in the world.

Dear all,

I am delighted to announce that Dr. Gabor Fichtinger of the Queen’s School of Computing has been awarded a Level 1 Research Chair in Medical Imaging by Cancer Care Ontario. This award is a recognition of the high quality of Dr. Fichtinger’s contributions in the area of Biomedical Computing. The Research Chair is also the first in health care research to be awarded to a researcher in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s University by an external organization. Further details in what follows.

Congratulations Gabor and best wishes.
Selim

Cancer Care Ontario Announces 2010 Research Chairs

Dr. Gabor Fichtinger of the Queen’s School of Computing is one of six Ontario researchers to receive funding to further cancer research over the next five years under Cancer Care Ontario’s Research Chairs Program. The Program, funded by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, is designed to attract new leading scientists to Ontario and support outstanding scientists already working in the province. The Program focuses on quickly turning research findings into improvements in cancer services and clinical care for patients.

Dr. Fichtinger, named a Level 1 Research Chair in Medical Imaging, achieved a worldwide reputation in needle-based interventional oncology system development through his prior work at the Johns Hopkins University, one of the world’s most renowned medical institutions. He was recruited to Queen’s in 2007 and given the mandate of creating an advanced technology development program for interventional oncology. Dr. Fichtinger will work on creating a reusable platform for image-guided and robotic cancer interventions.

In the past two-years, CCO’s Research Chairs program has funded the research of 13 scientists. The 2010 awards will build Ontario’s research capacity in three priority areas – cancer imaging, experimental therapeutics and health services research.

Dave has reached the incredible milestone of working at Queen’s for 25 years. Here’s to another 25 🙂

Cheers!

Randy Ellis and his team are working to advance the understanding of hip motion to improve surgical performance for hip replacement.

“Our idea is novel and simple,” says Dr. Ellis. “It is the motion of a patient’s hip, and not the highly variable anatomy, that should guide component placement in hip-replacement surgery. An improved understanding of how an arthritic hip moves may lead to strategies for preventing arthritis, as well as improving surgical treatment.”

Although hip replacement is a common and usually successful surgery for advanced hip arthritis, many secondary surgeries are often required, most often because of failures that can be traced to improper component placement. Dr. Ellis and his team hope to eliminate the need for these revisionary surgeries.

This project is a collaborative effort between Queen’s and Johns Hopkins University.

The funding under the NSERC/CIHR Collaborative Health Research Program (CHRP) will support student research and materials for both projects.

http://www.queensu.ca/news/articles/queens-computer-assisted-surgery-projects-receive-nserc-funding

Dr. Stewart and his team are developing computer-assisted surgical methods that allow surgeons to perform cartilage repair by mapping a damaged knee and pinpointing ideal locations for cartilage removal. To repair damage to the knee, healthy cartilage is removed from a non-load-bearing area of the knee and is transplanted to the damaged area. Surgeons currently do this by eye, often with varied results. The new technology should lead to more consistent and reliable results. Ideally, cartilage repair will reduce the need for total knee replacements, and allow people 50 and under the freedom to remain active despite their injuries.

“It’s a good option because it’s a smaller operation than a total knee replacement and it can treat people earlier,” says Dr. Stewart.

The funding under the NSERC/CIHR Collaborative Health Research Program (CHRP) will support student research and materials for both projects.

http://www.queensu.ca/news/articles/queens-computer-assisted-surgery-projects-receive-nserc-funding

SPIE – The International Society for Optics and Photonics – has awarded Mohamed Hefny a SPIE Scholarship in Optical Science and Engineering for his project “Image-Guided Navigation Systems for Minimally Invasive Surgery”.

Well done Mohamed and best wishes.
Selim

This morning we learned Dr. Farhana Zulkernine will be returning to the Queen’s School of Computing this summer as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She was awarded a MITACS Elevate / CA Canada Industrial Fellowship for her research “Decision Support for Database Administrators using Warehouse-as-a-service (DSDAware).”

Congratulations, Farhana and welcome home.

Selim

TO TRY a new gaming style, grab some plastic and put a chip on your shoulder.

Zi Ye and Hammad Khalid of the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, have devised a way of using a shoulder-mounted projector system to display – and play – a game on a bendy A4-sized sliver of plastic. Sensors in the screen allow gameplay to be controlled by bending, shaking or tapping it.

For the full story, click here.