Professor J. Michael Fitzpatrick, EECS, is among this year’s 72 new Fellows of the Society honored by SPIE.
Fellows are members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging.
They are honored for their technical achievement, for their service to the general optics community, and to SPIE in particular. More than 500 SPIE members have become Fellows since the Society’s inception in 1955.
Fitzpatrick is recognized for specific achievements in image registration in medical imaging.
“The annual recognition of Fellows provides an opportunity for us to acknowledge outstanding members for their service to the general optics community,” says Kevin G. Harding, SPIE president.
Fitzpatrick has focused his research on the significant problem of image registration, specifically within medical imaging. Accurate registration of two (or more) clinical images, taken at different times or with different modalities is vitally important for subsequent diagnostic analysis or image-guided surgery.
Fitzpatrick has contributed major advances in this area, as well as a number of ancillary areas, for example, analysis validation, image-guided surgery, radiotherapy treatment planning, properties of MRI images, and construction of fiducial markers for various imaging modalities.
And, he was not only responsible for engineering a system for image-guided surgery, but also designed a component of the hardware, the image processing algorithms, and the validation strategy.
Fitzpatrick holds 12 patents, has published dozens of refereed journal papers, and with Milan Sonka, Fitzpatrick co-edited The Handbook of Medical Imaging; Volume 2, Medical Image Processing and Analysis (SPIE Press, 2000). This 1218-page tome is a landmark compendium on the status of medical imaging.
His contributions to the SPIE medical imaging community are significant. He served as the track chair for Image Registration from 1996 through 2003; served on the program committee for Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention from 2002 through 2005; and was the co-chair of the Image Processing Conference at the SPIE Medical Imaging symposium from 2002 through 2005.
About SPIE
SPIE is an international society advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light. In 1955 SPIE was founded in California as the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers. To reflect a changing Membership, the Society began doing business as SPIE—The International Society for Optical Engineering. In 2007, the Society ended its DBA and is referred to simply as SPIE.
Serving the interests of its more than 188,000 active constituents representing 138 different countries, SPIE publishes six scientific journals and a digital library containing over 235,000 online papers with over 17,000 papers added annually, and is affiliated with over 140 meetings and events globally each year. The Society’s international membership exceeds 17,500 with over 500 fellows and 100 student chapters around the world.