Nick Tustison, DSc

Research Interests

In summary, Dr. Tustison manipulates arrays of numbers with medical relevance; more specifically, as a member of the UVA Medical Imaging Research Department, he develops computational techniques for facilitating quantitation of anatomical and/or functional variability in different populations or over time as a consequence of disease or injury. Areas of active research include various projects with neuroradiology faculty, collaborative pulmonary research using hyperpolarized gases, and the open source dissemination of useful image analysis algorithms. The primary venue for the latter is the Insight Toolkit (ITK) of the National Institutes of Health with which Dr. Tustison has a history of development.

The following projects are ongoing:

• Longitudinal analysis and segmentation of pulmonary hyperpolarized gas imaging
• Neuroscientific advancements in both clinical hypothesis exploration and methodological development
• General algorithmic development and translational work
• Collaborative refactoring of the ITK image registration framework

Research Lab

• Hyperpolarized Gas MR Imaging
• Biomedical Image Analysis

Publications

Ventilation-based segmentation of the lungs using hyperpolarized (3)He MRI.Tustison NJ, Avants BB, Flors L, Altes TA, de Lange EE, Mugler JP 3rd, Gee JC. J Magn Reson Imaging. 2011 Oct;34(4):831-41. doi: 10.1002/jmri.22738. Epub 2011 Aug 11.

Pulmonary kinematics from tagged hyperpolarized helium-3 MRI. Tustison NJ, Awate SP, Cai J, Altes TA, Miller GW, de Lange EE, Mugler JP 3rd, Gee JC. J Magn Reson Imaging. 2010 May;31(5):1236-41.

Avants BB*, Tustison NJ*, Wu J, Cook PA, Gee JC: An open source framework for n-tissue segmentation with evaluation on public data, Neuroinformatics, 2011 Mar 5, PMCID: 21373993. *Joint first authorship

Topological well-composedness and glamorous glue: a digital gluing algorithm for topologically constrained front propagation.Tustison NJ, Avants BB, Siqueira M, Gee JC. IEEE Trans Image Process. 2011 Jun;20(6):1756-61. Epub 2010 Nov 29.

Point set registration using Havrda-Charvat-Tsallis entropy measures. Tustison NJ, Awate SP, Song G, Cook TS, Gee JC. IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2011 Feb;30(2):451-60. Epub 2010 Oct 11.

A reproducible evaluation of ANTs similarity metric performance in brain image registration. Avants BB, Tustison NJ, Song G, Cook PA, Klein A, Gee JC. Neuroimage. 2011 Feb 1;54(3):2033-44. Epub 2010 Sep 17

Feature analysis of hyperpolarized helium-3 pulmonary MRI: a study of asthmatics versus nonasthmatics. Tustison NJ, Altes TA, Song G, de Lange EE, Mugler JP 3rd, Gee JC. Magn Reson Med. 2010 Jun;63(6):1448-55.

Pulmonary kinematics from tagged hyperpolarized helium-3 MRI. Tustison NJ, Awate SP, Cai J, Altes TA, Miller GW, de Lange EE, Mugler JP 3rd, Gee JC. J Magn Reson Imaging. 2010 May;31(5):1236-41.

N4ITK: improved N3 bias correction. Tustison NJ, Avants BB, Cook PA, Zheng Y, Egan A, Yushkevich PA, Gee JC. IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2010 Jun;29(6):1310-20. Epub 2010 Apr 8.

Directly manipulated free-form deformation image registration. Tustison NJ, Avants BB, Gee JC. IEEE Trans Image Process. 2009 Mar;18(3):624-35. Epub 2009 Jan 20.