Professor, Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering
Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Director, National Science Foundation Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Education:
D.Sc., Electrical Engineering, Washington University, 1989
M.S., Electrical Engineering, Washington University, 1987
B. Tech., Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, 1984

Career Highlights:
Roysam directs the Rensselaer portion of the National Science Foundation Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS). He joined the Rensselaer faculty in the fall of 1989 as an assistant professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1995, and to full professor in 2001. Roysam also began serving as an adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer in 1998.

He has authored 50 journal publications, four book chapters, and more than 90 conference publications. Roysam currently is an associate editor for the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ IEEE Transactions on Information Technology for Biomedicine. He has given dozens of invited talks and been featured in numerous media articles.

Roysam also been honored with the Digital Equipment Faculty Incentives for Excellence Award, the Prize Paper Award of the IEEE Industry Applications Society, and the Best Paper Award of the 1999 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. His students have received 16 awards to date.

His professional memberships include IEEE, Society for Molecular Imaging (SMI), Microscopy Society of America (MSA), Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, and American Society for Engineering Educators (ASEE). He also was elected to membership in Sigma Xi in 1991 and is listed in Marquis' Who’s Who in Science and Engineering.

Research Areas:
Roysam's core research discipline is the development of software and hardware technologies for analysis of biological/medical images, especially those that are 3-D, multi-temporal, multi/hyper-spectral, and from multiple modalities. Such images are particularly challenging to process, due to their exceptionally high variability and high dimensionality. They require a convergence of image modeling, segmentation and registration techniques, robust estimation approaches, and pattern analysis. The processing tasks are computationally demanding; therefore, high-performance computing is an integral part of this work.

This discipline is driven by several compelling and visible real-world applications, such as laser retinal surgery, quantitative tissue engineering using stem cells, neural implant research, and quantitative cell and tissue-level structural and functional mapping of various parts of the human brain. Such applications provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary research, and represent a fertile and rapidly growing area.

Two examples of commercially licensed tools developed under Roysam’s leadership are Quantitative cat-FISH (Compartmental and Temporal Analysis of Fluorescence In-Situ Hybridization Signals) and RPI-Trace3D. Quantitative cat-FISH is an innovative software program that can quantify the spatio-temporal patterns of immediate early gene transcription activity from multi-dimensional images of rat hippocampi after the animals have run through specially designed mazes. RPI-Trace3D can rapidly map complex spatio-temporal changes in tumor microvasculature, and also quantify the complexity of the image data. This tool cuts the time of manually tracing vessels from days down to just two minutes. In use at Harvard Medical School and at Wadsworth Center, RPI-Trace3D is valuable to oncologists who aim to understand how blood vessels develop in tumors, and how blood vessels are affected by the insertion of neural implants.

Currently, Roysam is actively engaged in the FARSIGHT project, which stands for Fluorescence Association Rules for Image Insight. This innovative project aims to integrate the core technologies underlying cat-FISH and RPI-Trace3D, using a set of innovative spatio-temporal Fluorescence Association Rules that can be applied to a broad range of bioscience problems.

Selected Publications:
C.-L. Tsai, C.V. Stewart, H.L. Tanenbaum, and B. Roysam, “Model-Based Method for Improving The Accuracy and Repeatability of Estimating Vascular Bifurcations and Crossovers From Retinal Fundus Images," IEEE Transactions on IT in Biomedicine, 8, (2), 122-130, (2004).

N.M. Dowell-Mesfin, M.-A. Abdul-Karim, A.M.P. Turner, S. Schanz, H.G. Craighead, B. Roysam, J.N. Turner, and W. Shain, “Topographically Modified Surfaces Affect Orientation and Growth of Hippocampal Neurons,” Journal of Neural Engineering, 1, (2), 78-90, (2004).

G. Lin, K.L. Fritzsche, C.V. Stewart, H.L. Tanenbaum, and B. Roysam, "Predictive Scheduling Algorithms for Real-time Feature Extraction and Spatial Referencing: Application to Retinal Image Sequences," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 51, (1), 115-125, (2004).

K. Al-Kofahi, A. Can, S. Lasek, D. Szarowski, N. Dowell, W. Shain, J.N. Turner, and B. Roysam, "Median Based Robust Algorithms for Tracing Neurons from Noisy Confocal Microscope Images," IEEE Transactions on Information Technology In Biomedicine, 7, (4), 302-317, (2003).

M.S. Gee, S. Makonnen, K. al-Kofahi, B. Roysam, F. Payvandi, H.-W. Man, G.W. Muller, and W.M.F. Lee, "Selective Cytokine Inhibitory Drugs with Enhanced Antiangiogenic Activity Control Tumor Growth Through Vascular Inhibition," Cancer Research, 63, 8073-8078, (2003).

C.V. Stewart, C.-L.Tsai, and B. Roysam, "A Dual Bootstrap Iterative Closest Point (ICP) Algorithm: Application to Retinal Image Registration," IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Special Issue on Medical Image Registration, 22, (11), 1379-1394, (2003).

G. Lin, U. Adiga, K. Olson, J.F. Guzowski, C.A. Barnes, and B. Roysam, "A Hybrid 3-D Watershed Algorithm Incorporating Gradient Cues and Object Models for Automatic Segmentation of Nuclei in Confocal Image Stacks," Cytometry Part A, 56A, (1), 23-36, (2003).

M.-A. Abdul-Karim, K. Al-Kofahi, E.B. Brown, R.K. Jain, and B. Roysam, "Automated Tracing And Change Analysis Of Tumor Vasculature From In Vivo Multiphoton Confocal Image Time Series," Microvascular Research, 66, (2), 113-125, (2003).

A. Can, O. Al-Kofahi, S. Lasek, D.H. Szarowski, J.N. Turner, and B. Roysam, "Attenuation Correction in Confocal Laser Microscopes: A Novel Two-View Approach," Journal of Microscopy, 211, (1), 67-79, (2003).

O. Al-Kofahi, A. Can, S. Lasek, D.H. Szarowski, J.N. Turner, and B. Roysam, "Hierarchical Algorithms for Affine 3-D Registration of Neuronal Images Acquired by Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy," Journal of Microscopy, 211, (1), 8-18, (2003).

Contact Information:
Badrinath “Badri” Roysam
(518) 276-8067
roysam@ecse.rpi.edu
http://www.eng.rpi.edu/soe/directory_faculty_details.cfm?facultyID=roysab