Biography | Publications

Michel Audette was born in Alma, Quebec, Canada and grew up in or near various cities in Canada: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. He is equally well travelled in his career.

He completed his Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, graduating in 1986. Dr. Audette then worked for 3 years in flight simulation at CAE Electronics. He completed his Master's in Electrical Engineering in 1992 from Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, under Paul Cohen, where he specialized in correspondence for structure from stereo and from motion. Dr. Audette then worked in vision-based welding automation, using laser range-sensing. 

He returned to school once again to pursue his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at McGill, while maintaining his employment at ISG Technologies (leading to early US patents in surgical image guidance). Dr. Audette graduated in 2002. His thesis research, under Terry Peters and Kaleem Siddiqi, dealt with a range- and surface-based approach to characterizing intra-surgical brain-shift, including the application of laser range-sensing inspired by his previous work in automation; a Level Set based pre-surgical brain surface identification in MR data; an Iterative Closest Point based nonrigid surface registration that made use of an instantaneous look-up method based on a prior Closest Point Map computed from the pre-surgical surface. This research has subsequently influenced intra-surgical guidance research at Vanderbilt University (M. Miga) and the University of Shanghai (Y. Liu).

His post-doctoral research was carried out at AIST in Tsukuba, Japan. This research emphasized anatomical modeling (segmentation, meshing) as well as haptics toward simulation of transnasal pituitary surgery. Further research was done at the Innovation Center Computer Assisted Surgery (ICCAS) in Leipzig, Germany. This research emphasized surgery simulation and model-based surgical guidance. While conducting research at ICCAS, Dr. Audette served as a thesis advisor to 6 Diplom (Master's) students. 

Some of his contributions include the introduction of range-sensing to the medical imaging community, a well cited review paper on surface registration for medical applications, early modeling methods in patient-specific surgery simulation and, recently, a novel method for high-resolution ear model to patient CT registration.

Publications