ece@iit Magazine

Adam Berg, winner of the 2007 Chicago Young Innovator's Award

ECE Senior Adam Berg Wins Young Innovator's Award

Electrical engineering undergraduate Adam Berg (EE 5th year) was honored with the Young Innovator’s Award at the Chicago Innovation Awards for his work on the IPRO AudioDoc (now called SonicStep–EnPRO 350), an innovative language-learning tool that runs on mobile devices. Berg, who is active in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Academy, worked on the project in spring 2006 and fall 2007, during which time it won a number of IPRO awards. By integrating spoken audio, corresponding text, and a dictionary onto cell phones and MP3 players, the tool creates language learning material out of any audio recording that has a corresponding transcript, using speech recognition technology to align audio to text from a variety of sources beyond the usual textbooks used by foreign language learners.

The Chicago Innovation Awards, sponsored by the Chicago Sun-Times and Kuczmarski & Associates, and now in their sixth year, were held Monday, October 22, at the Goodman Theater. “It was awesome to see a strong showing of IIT students, faculty, staff, and  administration, both in the audience and on stage,” says Berg. “I hope that the Chicago Young Innovator Award can challenge students to realize and take advantage of the fantastic learning experiences that IIT offers—not only in in their respective majors but in other very important programs like  entrepreneurship.”

ECE professor and MIRC researcher Yongyi Yang

Medical Imaging Update

The Medical Imaging Research Center (MIRC) at Illinois Institute of Technology is one of the most progressive research centers in Chicago. The interdisciplinary faculty members are developing new imaging modalities and techniques for acquisition, processing, and analysis of medical images. Housed in the university’s new Technology and Business Center, the MIRC researchers have state-of-the-art space to continue their long-term projects that are changing the way we look at human anatomy.

Professor Yongyi Yang, one of the center’s senior researchers, is currently working on a project in spatio-temporal image processing for medical imaging. Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Whitaker Foundation, he has developed several image-processing techniques for improving the quality of cardiac images in SPECT, which is a standard imaging procedure to assess coronary artery disease. He has pioneered an adaptive mesh-based approach for image reconstruction and has developed a new imaging framework for reconstruction of gated dynamic cardiac images. With Yang’s system, cardiac patients are evaluated in a single imaging session that provides information about cardiac perfusion, wall motion, and tracer kinetics simultaneously, eliminating the need for several consecutive time-consuming tests.

In another project funded by NIH, Yang has worked to develop image processing and machine learning methods for early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer using mammographic images. He and his colleagues at MIRC designed a data retrieval system in which the radiologist is presented with mammograms from past cases that the computer concludes are relevant to the case being evaluated. This retrieval system, in effect, provides radiologists with an online atlas of images with known pathology. Modern machine learning and image processing techniques were applied for modeling similarity scores between the mammographic images, based on a database obtained through collaboration with researchers at the University of Chicago. The approach provides image retrieval results that closely match the preferences of the user and improves the diagnostic accuracy of mammographic interpretation.

Both of these projects, and several other MRIC developments, have the potential to dramatically improve the way medical professionals diagnose and treat patients. For more information on medical imaging at IIT, visit the MIRC website.