Clinical Bioimaging and Functional Genomics

Elisa Ficarra, Visiting Researcher at EPFL-IC-LSI

Abstract: A consistent amount of research in genomics has been carried out in the last few years concerning correlation of gene expression to multi-factorial genetic pathologies. Microarrays are the main instrument exploited so far for this purpose. Despite this effort, results obtained are strongly limited by the poor informative content provided by clustering techniques applied on microarray's data. At the same time, in the field of biomedical and molecular imaging, new techniques have been shown to be effective in extracting clinical and functional biological information from images of molecules and tissues. Moreover, the advent of sophisticated light microscope techniques has made studying dynamic processes in living cells now possible. By observing processes as they happen within the cell, these techniques add an important extra dimension to the understanding of cell behavior and function for early disease detection and drug response. In the clinic, new applications of conventional imaging technologies are likely to play increasingly important roles, particularly in oncology. Up to now, these two independent sources of information, namely microarrays and bioimaging, have never been correlated to enhance gene expression analysis or to increase the level of credibility in the hypothesized gene expression paths. In this seminar, a bioimaging framework will be proposed that will be able to extract a set of parameters giving a characterization of pathology dynamics from living cell and tissue images.