Biography | Publications

Dr. Turek received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University (1995), his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University (1999) and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).  His research, while at RPI, focused on applying combinatorial optimization techniques to computer vision problems. In particular, Dr. Turek worked on novel approaches for estimating motion under difficult lighting conditions, multiscale techniques for segmentation and motion estimation, and deformable multi-object tracking.

Prior to completing his Ph.D., Dr. Turek was a member of the Visualization and Computer Vision Group at GE Global Research where he worked on both industrial visualization and medical imaging projects. He was responsible for leading imaging research into quantification of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) as part of GE's first joint research effort with GlaxoSmithKline. In addition, Dr. Turek led the segmentation and visualization efforts for GE's early work in CT cardiac imaging.

Before joining GE Global Research, Dr. Turek was a member of the Edison Engineering program at GE Medical Systems where he developed software for GE's first multislice CT machine and GE's first digital radiography system.

Dr. Turek joined Kitware in September 2007 where he works on both medical imaging and computer vision problems. During his time at Kitware, he has contributed to the Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and activity recognition work in computer vision.

Dr. Turek currently holds 13 US patents.

 

Publications

1. M. W. Turek and D. Freedman. Multiscale Modeling and Constraints for Max-flow/Min-cut Problems in Computer Vision. In 5th IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision (POCV). 2006

2. D. Freedman and M. W. Turek. Illumination-invariant Tracking via Graph Cuts. In IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), volume 2, pages 10-17, 2005.

3. P. R. S. Mendonça, D. R. Padfield, J. V. Miller, M. Turek . Bias in the Localization of Curved Edges. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), volume 2, pages 554-565, 2004.

4. H. Cline, C. Coulam, M. Yavuz, G. D. Rubin, P. Edic, T. Pan, Y. Shen, R.
Avila, M. Turek, M. Iatrou, A. Loree, N. Ishaque, R. Senzig. Coronary Artery Angiography Using Multislice Computed Tomography Images. In Circulation, volume 102, pages 1589-1590, 2000.