William M. Wells, PhD

I am a researcher in medical image analysis with the Surgical Planning Laboratory, a unit of the MRI division of the Radiology Department of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. I maintain an active collaboration with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where I have worked with a talented group of graduate students. I am also affiliated with the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Modern medical images contain vast amounts of anatomical information. Much of this information is accessible to diagnostic radiologists, in part because people (in contrast to computers) are very good at image interpretation. The anatomical information latent in such images is also valuable for disease and neuroscience research, as well as for drug trials. The quantitative analysis of medical images by computer, however, remains challenging. Among the most basic capabilities of medical image analysis are segmentation, the process of assigning labels to structures in images, and registration, the process of placing different images into anatomical agreement.  I have been active in research in both these areas.  Within NCIGT, my focus is in applying segmentation and registration methods to applications in image-guided therapy.