Richard M. Leahy Professor and Director Signal and Image Processing Institute

Richard Leahy was born in Surrey, England in 1960. He received the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England in 1981 and 1985 respectively. In 1985 he joined USC where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering - Systems and Director of the Signal and Image Processing Institute. He holds joint appointments with the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering at USC. His research interests lie in the application of signal and image processing theory to biomedical inverse problems. His current research involves the development of inverse methods for imaging of biological function with applications to functional neuroimaging and oncology.

Research Interests

• Reconstrution and analysis of 2D and 3D PET images with applications to oncology, brain imaging and small animal studies.
• Spatio-temporal localization and imaging of neural activation using EEG and MEG
• Functional and anatomical MR brain imaging
• Segmentation, matching and integration of multimodal brain images

Technical Activities

• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, since August, 1989.
• Member, IEEE Signal Processing Society , Multidimensional Signal Processing Committee, 1996-present
• Associate Chairman, IEEE Medical Imaging Conference, Orlando, Fl, 1992.
• Associate Chairman, IEEE Medical Imaging Conference, San Francisco, Ca, 1993.
• Chair and organizer: Special Session of ICASSP93 on Biomedical Signal Processing, Minneapolis, April 1993.
• Co-chair: SPIE Conference on Mathematical Imaging, Int. Symposium on Optical and Optoelectronic Applied Science and Engineering, San Diego, July, 1990.
• Co-chair, International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging, 2001.
• Member of Program Committee, IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium, and Medical Imaging Conference: 1989, 1991-1993, 1995-1999.
• Member of Scientific Committee, International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging: 1993, 1995, 1997. 1999.
• Member of Program Committee, 1994 and 1995 SPIE Medical Imaging Conferences Image Processing Section.
  

Recent Doctoral Dissertations

• Sam Song, Recovery of 3-D motion from 3D density images, Dec., 1991.
• Zhenyu Wu, Hierarchical and graph theoretic approaches to image segmentation and pattern classification, May 1992. .
• John Compton Mosher, Localization from near-source quasi-static electromagnetic fields, May, 1993.
• Erkan Mumcuoglu, Statistical modeling and fast Bayesian reconstruction in positron emission tomography, Sept., 1994. .
• Stephanie Sandor, Atlas guided deformable models for automatic anatomic labelling of MR brain images, Dec., 1994
• James W. Phillips, Dynamic MEG-Based Imaging of Focal Neuronal Current Sources, March 1997.
• Ching-Han Lance Hsu, Bayesian image reconstruction techniques for Positron Emission Tomography: Theory and Applications, August 1998, Currently an Assistant Professor at Chang Gung University, Taiwan.
• Bijan Timsari, Geometrical medeling and analysis of cortical surfaces: an approach to finding flat maps of the human brain, August, 1999. Currently with “8x8” in San Jose.
• Jinyi Qi, Bayesian image estimation for fully three-dimensional Positron Emission Tomography, Dec., 1998. Currently a Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Publications

• Please refer to our publication page for an online set of recent publications