Abstract:
We have recently coined the word "psychophysiomatics" to express our interest in this new direction of research. Advances in image and signal processing technologies play an increasingly important role in mental health research. Psychiatrists and psychologists rely on brain imaging and pulse wave data for the study of depression and cognitive functions to monitor mental health changes in patients. Physiologists apply biomedical images and electrical properties of biological cells and tissues to patients' therapy. Interestingly, such studies in computational psychiatry, psychology and physiology allow life-science researchers to investigate the causal relationships between social life style, depression, and pathophysiology. Our research group attempts to address issues and new directions in the applications of image and signal analysis to psychiatry, psychology and physiology. This talk presents novel computational and entropic models for studying the dynamic behaviors of the physiological, cardiac and neural signals: time series and images. These models can detect subtle patterns of disease and control; and hence a promising analytical tool for understanding life-science problems at systems level, early prediction, and biomedical hypothesis validation.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Tuan D. Pham received his PhD degree in 1995 from the University of New South Wales. His current research interests include image processing, molecular and medical image analysis, pattern recognition, bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, fuzzy-set algorithms, genetic algorithms, neural networks, geostatistics, signal processing, fractals and chaos. His research has been funded by the Australian Research Council, academic institutions, and industry. Dr. Pham is an editorial board member of several journals and book series including Pattern Recognition (Elsevier), Current Bioinformatics (Bentham), Recent Patents on Computer Science (Bentham), Proteomics Insights (open access journal, Libertas Academica Press), Book Series on Bioinformatics and Computational BioImaging (Artech House), invited Regional Editor of International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology (Inderscience Publishers), and invited Editor-in-Chief of WSEAS Transaction on Biology and Biomedicine. He has been serving as chair and technical committee member of more than 30 international conferences in the fields of image processing, pattern recognition, computational intelligence, and computational life sciences.