Welcome to my webpage!
I am a PhD Student at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Northeastern University. I received my master's degree in Computer Science from Boston University in 2009. I am a member of Cognitive Systems Lab (CSL) and my advisor is Prof. Deniz Erdogmus. My current research interests include biomedical image processing and computer vision.
Research Projects: back to top
Real Time Lung Tumor Tracking
Radiotherapy
is an effective treatment technique for lung cancer. However, the movement
of lung tumors during normal respiration makes it difficult to accurately
irradiate the tumor. Precise lung tumor localization is vital to
efficiently treating the tumor and avoiding unnecessary radiation exposure
of normal tissues. Estimating the motion model of the tumor may lead to
improved treatment planning and dose calculation throughout the therapy.
4D Computed Tomography (CT) images taken prior to treatment (to develop
the patient's treatment plan) provide valuable information about the
movement of the thoracic organs and the tumor. For each radiotherapy
treatment session, a set of kilovoltage X-ray images (kV images) are
acquired to aid in the alignment of the treatment target relative to the
radiation beam. This project focuses on
real time lung tumor tracking by incorporating information and labels from
4DCT on kV x-ray videos for treatment-day specific tumor motion models.
Biomedical Image Segmentation using Principal Curves and Surfaces:
Segmentation of organs is an essential and time consuming task for radiation treatment of cancers. The aim of this project is to utilize principal curves for automatic/semi-automatic segmentation of organs.
Cell Motion Flow Analysis:
Analyzing motion flow of cells is a challenging problem due to noise in images and uncontrolled motion of cells. In this study, we are interested in automatically detecting the regions of organized motion and motion patterns on cell videos.
Predicting Migration of Cancer Cells using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (Past)
Diffusion tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a biomedical
visualization technique, which shows direction of water diffusion.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is an application of diffusion MRI aiming
to extract and characterize diffusion anisotropy affects. When applied
to brain, DTI shows the motion flow in the white matter of brain.
Radiotherapy is widely used in treatment of malignant brain lesions.
Current treatment plans include a fixed length margin around the tumor
region of interest to account for the possible tumor spread. However,
progressive tumors might occur outside of these margins, which requires
more analysis about the spread of brain tumors. In this project, we are
interested in predicting migration of cancer cells by using diffusion
tensor MRI and finding out whether neuronal fiber pathways might
provide possible routes for the spread of cancer cells. The outcome will
help creating improved
anisotropic margins for radiation treatment of brain tumors.
Robust Facial Feature Tracking (Past)
At Boston University, I worked on Camera Mouse project under the supervision of Prof. Margrit Betke. Camera Mouse is a mouse replacement interface for users with severe disabilities. I was interested in automatic re-initialization techniques in the time of tracking failure. Proposed method involves an information fusion approach using multiple cameras. You can see a video of me here using the multiview tracking system, where the system tracks my nose tip and below is the 3D reconstructed trajectories. Basically, each view has independent 2D trackers and is assigned a reliability measure, which is used to decide a tracking failure.
Publications: back to top
Motion Flow Analysis in Cell Videos Using a Multi-Level
Clustering Method
Esra Ataer-Cansizoglu, Nastaran Ghadarghadar, Ramin Zareian, Erhan
Bas, Jeffrey W. Ruberti, Deniz Erdogmus.
International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and
Biology Society (EMBC), 2011
paper
presentation
video-1
video-2
Principal Curve Based Semi-Automatic Segmentation of
Organs in 3D-CT
Sheng You, Erhan Bas, Esra Ataer-Cansizoglu, Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer,
Deniz Erdogmus.
International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and
Biology Society (EMBC), 2011
paper
poster
A Novel Application of Principal Surfaces to
Segmentation in 4D-CT for Radiation Treatment Planning, Sheng You, Esra
Ataer-Cansizoglu, Deniz Erdogmus, James Tanyi, and Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer,
Deniz Erdogmus. International Conference on Machine Learning and
Applications (ICMLA), 2010
paper
presentation
Towards Respiration Management in Radiation
Treatment of Lung Tumors: Transferring Region of Interest from
Planning CT to Kilovoltage X-ray Images
Esra Ataer-Cansizoglu, Erhan Bas, M. Ali Yousuf, Sheng You,
Warren D. D'Souza, Deniz Erdogmus.
International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and
Biology Society (EMBC), 2010
paper
poster
An Information Fusion Approach for Multiview
Feature Tracking
Esra Ataer-Cansizoglu, Margrit Betke.
International Conference on Pattern
Recognition (ICPR), 2010
Movement and Recovery Analysis of a
Mouse-Replacement Interface for Users with Severe Disabilities
Caitlin Connor, Emily Yu, John Magee, Esra Cansizoglu, Samuel
Epstein, Margit Betke, HCI
International Conference, 2009
paper
Matching Ottoman Words: An Image Retrieval Approach to Historical
Document Indexing
Esra Ataer, Pinar Duygulu. In Proceedings of
ACM International
Conference on Image and Video Retrieval,(CIVR), 2007
paper
Retrieval of Ottoman Documents
Esra Ataer, Pinar Duygulu. In Proceedings of
ACM SIGMM
International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR)
in Conjuction with ACM
Multimedia, 2006
Osmanlica Kelimeleri Esleme - Matching
Ottoman Words (in Turkish)
Esra Ataer, Pinar Duygulu. In Proceedings of
IEEE 15. Sinyal İşleme ve
İletişim Uygulamaları Kurultayı (SIU),
2007
A New Representation for Matching Words
Bilkent University, Department of Computer Engineering, Master of
Science Thesis, July 2007
CV: back to top
You can reach my CV from here.