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 at Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, under Paul Cohen, specializing in correspondence for structure from stereo and from motion, graduating in 1992. He then worked in vision-based welding automation, using laser range-sensing. 

He returned to school once again to pursue PhD in Biomedical Engineering at McGill, while maintaining his employement 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 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. Audetted 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

M.A. Audette, H. Delingette, A. Fuchs, O. Astley and K. Chinzei, A. "Topologically Faithful, Tissue-guided, Spatially Varying Meshing Strategy for Computing Patient-specific Head Models for Endoscopic Pituitary Surgery Simulation". Journal of Computer Aided Surgery, Taylor & Francis, 12(1): 43–52; January 2007.

M.A. Audette, K. Siddiqi, F.P. Ferrie & T.M. Peters. "An Integrated Range-sensing, Segmentation and Registration Framework for the Characterization of Intra-surgical Brain Deformations in Image-Guided Surgery". Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Special issue on Nonrigid Registration, Academic Press, 89(2/3): 226-251, Feb.-March 2003.

M.A. Audette, F.P. Ferrie, & T.M. Peters. "An Algorithmic Overview of Surface Registration Techniques for Medical Imaging". Medical Image Analysis, Elsevier Science, 4 (3): 201-217; Sept. 2000, republished in Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2002.

M.A. Audette, I. Hertel, O. Burgert, & G. Strauss. "A Tissue Relevance and Meshing Method for Computing Patient-specific Anatomical Models in Endoscopic Sinus Surgery Simulation". Advances in Computational Vision and Medical Image Processing: Methods and Applications, ed. João M.R.S Tavares & R. Natal, Springer, 2008.

M.A. Audette, M.I. Miga, J. Nemes, K. Chinzei, & T.M. Peters. "A Review Of Biomechanical Modeling of the  Brain for Intrasurgical Displacement Estimation and Medical Simulation". Invited contribution, Biomechanical Systems, ed. CT Leondes, World Scientific Publishing, 2008.

M. Audette, R. Brooks, R. Funnell, G. Strauss, T. Arbel. "Piecewise affine initialized spline-based patient-specific registration of a high-resolution ear model for surgical guidance". MICCAI Workshop on Image Guidance and Computer Assistance for Soft-Tissue Interventions, 2008.                 

F. Li, D. Bartz, L. Gu, M.A. Audette. "An Iterative Classification Method of 2D CT Head Data Based on Statistical and Spatial Information". Int. Conf. Pattern Recognition, Tampa, 2008.

C. Grühser, N. Ritter, G. Strauss, H. Maass, & M. Audette. "Development of a Tool-centered Collision Model for Volumetric Resection in ENT Surgery Simulation". EuroHaptics, 2008.

M.A. Audette & K. Chinzei. "The Application of Embedded and Tubular Structure to Tissue Identification for the Computation of Patient-specific Neurosurgical Simulation Models". International Symposium on Medical Simulation, Boston, LNCS 3078, pp. 203-210, 2004.

M.A. Audette, A. Fuchs, O. Astley, Y. Koseki & K. Chinzei. "Towards Patient-specific Anatomical Model Generation for Finite Element-based Surgical Simulation". International Symposium on Surgical Simulation & Soft Tissue Modeling (IS4TM), LNCS 2073, pp. Juan-Les-Pins, France, 2003.

M.A. Audette, K. Siddiqi, & T.M. Peters. "Level-set Surface Segmentation and Fast Cortical Range Image Tracking  for Computing Intrasurgical Deformations". MICCAI, Cambridge, England, pp. 788-797, Sept. 1999.

M. Audette, P. Cohen & J. Weng. "Shading-based Two-view Matching". International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Sydney, Australia, August 1991.