By SFU Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Fellows

As one of SFU's most outstanding graduate students from the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Dr. Lisa Tang is being recognized with the award of the Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal. On behalf of SFU, we congratulate Dr. Tang on her outstanding achievements. 

Dr. Lisa Tang is helping Vancouver in becoming a premier provider of effective patient care. Her doctoral research focused on the development, evaluation and improvement of medical imaging techniques such as Magnetic Resonance imaging (MRI) and Computed Topography (CT) scans. As part of her research in the School of Computing Science, Dr. Tang developed new methods for increasing the diagnostic value of imaging data. 

“These techniques may, for example, help health practitioners be able to better identify small tumors, and give them insights into further treatments,” said Dr. Tang.  Her contribution to the clinical community is already being felt.

During her graduate studies, she developed diagnosis tool, such as Tongue Track, which is a specialized software that tracks tongue movement in ultrasound videos in order to help professionals understand how the tongue functions normally and to diagnose and treat medical conditions. She also developed a tool with a graphical interface that performs rigid registration and image fusion, which had used by organizations like the BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver General Hospital, and Lions Gate Hospital. Lastly, she has helped develop software in collaboration with Halifax Biomedical aimed to help facilitate low-dose radiation imaging technology.

“Lisa Tang’s outstanding research has and I’m certain will continue to bring larger visibility to Vancouver and BC as a hub for medical image analysis in Western Canada,” said Dr. Ghassan Hamarneh, her supervisor and Professor of Computing Science at SFU.

During her doctoral program, Dr. Tang was awarded a President’s PhD Scholarship, three Graduate Fellowships, 2 NSERC scholarships, few international conference travel awards and various private scholarships. She was first author on three journal publications and several conference papers, and has co-authored a publication that received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 Machine Learning in Medical Imaging Conference.

“Receiving this medal makes me truly, truly grateful for the fundings I have received from various agencies like NSERC and Mitacs,“ she says. 

She adds, "Of course, as stated in my dissertation, without the unwavering guidance of Dr. Ghassan Hamarneh, as well as the continuous encouragement of Dr. Anna Celler of UBC, wonderful labmates at the Medical Image Analysis Lab (MIAL), and my dear friends and family, my thesis work would also have been impossible. In return of their support, it is my lifetime ambition to bring a positive difference to the world one day." 

Dr. Tang is now continuing to develop new insights and applications in medical imaging to help patients and BC and across Canada through a prestigious NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship on “Machine Learning for Multiple Sclerosis Prognosis” at UBC’s Centre for Brain Health, under the support of Dr. Roger Tam.

• Lisa Tang's publication listings
• LinkedIn: Lisa Tang
• ResearchGate: Lisa Tang
• Academia.edu: Lisa Tang
• Dissertation: Adaptive Energy Functions and Efficient Graph-based Optimization for Deformable Image Registration
• Supervisor: Dr. Ghassan Hamarneh
  
• Convocation Medal Winners 2015