Biography | Publications

Stephen R. Aylward, Ph.D. is Chief Medical Scientist at Kitware, Inc. He is working in Kitware's branch office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Dr. Aylward is also an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, is a member of the Pattern Recognition Society, serves on the SPIE Medical Imaging: Image Processing program committee, and is the elected president of the Insight Software Consortium - a non-profit agency that promotes the development and distribution of free software for medical image analysis, http://www.insightsoftwareconsortium.org.

Dr. Aylward's research has recently focused on (1) supporting the Insight Toolkit (http://www.itk.org) for medical image analysis; (2) developing model-to-image registration strategies for transcribing pre-operative findings into intra-operative images; (3) segmenting vascular networks from medical images for disease detection, diagnosis, and treatment monitoring; and (4) promoting digital library technologies for medical image archiving and sharing, as demonstrated by the Insight Journal, http://www.insight-journal.org. He is working at Kitware to integrate those and other technologies in clinical products and to lead and support related medical imaging projects within Kitware and in collaboration with other universities and companies. Stephen received a B.S. in computer science in 1988 from Purdue University, an M.S. in artificial intelligence in 1989 from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in medical image processing in 1997 from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Prior to joining Kitware, Stephen was a tenured Associate Professor of Radiology, an Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science and Surgery, and founder and Director of the Computer-Aided Diagnosis and Display Laboratory (http://caddlab.rad.unc.edu) at UNC. The CADDLab operated as the Image Processing Core Facility of UNC's School of Medicine. Its faculty and staff led grants funded by the NIH and foundations and provided image analysis support to a wide range of grants led by basic scientists and clinicians throughout the School of Medicine. Stephen also worked as the Lead Scientist of the Neural Networks Support Laboratory at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis.

Books and Patents

Aylward S, Continuous Mixture Modeling via Goodness-of-Fit Cores, Dissertation, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997. pages 175

Aylward S, Bullitt E, Fritsch D, Pizer S, System and Method for Representation and Analysis of Tubular Objects, US Patent 6,690,816

Aylward S, Bullitt E, Chapter 11: Clinical Applications Involving Vascular Image Segmentation and Registration in Angiography and Plaque Imaging, Academic Press, 2003 pp. 529-579

Aylward S, Kim J, Chapter 6: Statistical Methods in Medical Image Analysis Insight Into Images: Principles and practice for segmentations, registration, and image analysis, AK Peters, April, 2004

Journal Articles since 2001

Bullitt E, Aylward S, Smith K, Mukherji S, Jiroutek M, Muller K, Symbolic Description of Intracerebral Vessels from MRA and Evaluation by Comparison with X-Ray Angiograms, Medical Image Analysis, 5, 2001, pp. 157-169

Bullitt E, Aylward S, Bernard E, Gerig G, Special Article. Computer-assisted visualization of arteriovenous malformations on the home pc. Neurosurgery: 48: 2001, pp. 576-583

Aylward S, Bullitt E, Initialization, Noise, Singularities, and Scale in Height Ridge Traversal for Tubular Object Centerline Extraction IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, February, 2002, pages 61-76

Aylward S, Continuous Gaussian Mixture Modeling. Pattern Recognition, September, 2002, pp. 1821-1833

Bullitt E, Aylward S, Patient-specific vascular models for endovascular and open operative procedures. International Congress Series 1247C:129-138

Bullitt E, Aylward S, Fast, high-quality, volume rendering of vascular anatomy via segmentation, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 21(8), August 2002, pp. 998-1002

Pizer S, Gerig G, Joshi S, Aylward S, Multiscale Medial Shape-Based Analysis of Image Objects Proceedings of the IEEE, 91(10), 2003, pp 1670-1679

Wallace DK, Jomier J, Aylward S, Landers III MB. Computer Automated Quantification of Plus Disease in Retinopathy of Prematurity. Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus 7:126-130 2003

Bullitt E, Gerig G, Pizer SM, Lin W, Aylward SR, Measuring tortuosity of the intracerebral vasculature from MRA images IEEE-TMI, 22(9), September, 2003 pp. 1163- 1171

Aylward S, Jomier J, Weeks S, Bullitt E, Registration of Vascular Images, International Journal of Computer Vision, 55(3), November, 2003, pp. 123-138

Fridman Y, Pizer S, Aylward S, Bullitt E, Extracting branching tubular object geometry via cores Medical Image Analysis, 8(3), 2004 pp. 169-176

Bullitt E, Ewend M, Aylward S, Lin W, Gerig G, Joshi S, Jung I, Muller K, Smith K, Abnormal vessel tortuosity as a marker of treatment response of malignant gliomas: Preliminary report. Technology in Cancer Research and Treatment 3, 2004, pp. 577-584

Bullitt E, Muller K, Jung I, Lin W, Aylward SR, Analyzing attributes of vessel populations. Medical Image Analysis 9, 2004, pp. 39-49

Bullitt E, Zeng D, Gerig G, Aylward S, Joshi S, Smith JK, Lin W, Ewend MG (2005) Vessel tortuosity and brain tumor malignancy: A blinded study. Academic Radiology /12:1232-1240.

Select Refereed and Published-in-full Conference Papers Since 2001

Aylward S, Weeks S, Bullitt E Analysis of the parameter space of a metric for registering 3D vascular images. MICCAI, 2208 LNCS, Springer-Verlag, 2001. pp. 932-939

Ibanez L, Nyg L, Gee J, Aylward S, Registration Patterns: The Generic Framework for Image Registration of the Insight Toolkit IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, July, 2002, Pages 4

Fridman Y, Pizer S, Aylward S, Bullitt E, Segmenting 3D Branching Tubular Structures Using Cores MICCAI 2003, November 2003, pp. 570-577

Jolly B, Van Horn M, Aylward S, Bullitt E, Needle Detection and Tracking in the TIPS Endovascular Procedure MICCAI 2003, November 2003, pp. 953-954

Cool D, Chillet D, Kim J, Foskey M, Aylward S, Tissue-Based Affine Registration of Brain Images to form a Vascular Density Atlas MICCAI 2003, November 2003, pp. 9-15

Chillet D, Jomier J, Cool D, Aylward S, Vascular Atlas Formation Using a Vessel-to-Image Affine Registration Method MICCAI 2003, November 2003, pp. 335-342

Guyon JP, Foskey M, Kim J, Firat Z, David B, Aylward S, VETOT, Volume Estimation and Tracking Over Time: Framework and Validation MICCAI 2003, November 2003, pp. 142-149

Jomier J, Wallace D, Aylward S, Quantification of Retinopathy of Prematurity via Vessel Segmentation MICCAI 2003, November 2003, pp. 620-626

Jomier J, Weeks S, Aylward S, Vascular Image Registration for Intra-Operative 3D Ultrasound Annotation Computer-Assisted Radiology and Surgery, Chicago IL 2004

Jomier J, Rault E, Aylward S, Automatic Quantification of Pupil Dilation Under Stress IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, Washington DC 2004, pp. 249-252

Bullitt E, Jung I, Muller K, Gerig G, Aylward S, Joshi S, Smith K, Lin W, Ewend M, Determining Malignancy of Brain Tumors by Analysis of Vessel Shape MICCAI 2004, pp. 645-653

Jomier J, Aylward S, Rigid and Deformable Vasculare-to-Image Registration: A Hierarchical Approach MICCAI 2004, pp. 829-836