News

2020 Nov: Basel White won a fellowship from the Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR) Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the academic year 2020-2021. The fellowship was awarded to 10 individual undergraduate students with proposals/research relating to AI.

2020 Oct: Basel White presented a poster titled “Wavelet-Based Automatic Breast Segmentation from Mammograms” at the 2020 Virtual Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting.

2020 Sept: We were recently awarded a 3-year $423K grant from the National Cancer Institute (start date Sept 4, 2020). The work is mostly centered on CompuMAINE lab’s work on the computational analyses of mammograms, but we also successfully proposed an extension of this work to breast tissue analyses from biopsies, lumpectomies, and mastectomies, thanks to Karissa Tilbury’s involvement.

Of note: Of all institutes at NIH, NCI is one of the most competitive to get funding from. While the funding rate for NIH as a whole is ~21% (substantially lower than NSF’s ~28%), the specific mechanism we went through has a funding rate of only 9.9% at NCI. Based on data obtained from UMaine’s ORA, this is the first grant to UMaine from NCI in 16 years, only the fourth overall in UMaine’s history, and the first ever in the College of Engineering.

2020 Sept: CompuMAINE Director, Andre Khalil, was promoted to full professor of Biomedical Engineering.

2020 July: CompuMAINE lab member Julia Liu received her MS in Geophysics and started her PhD in Geophysics at Boise State.

2020 May: CompuMAINE lab member Jeremy Juybari received his MA in Mathematics and started his PhD in ECE at the University of Maine. Click here for his MA Thesis.

2020 May: CompuMAINE lab member Basel White won the 2020 Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR) Summer Research Fellowship and has been accepted to present at the annual Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) National Symposium.

2020 (Jan / Feb): With the recent award of a patent for early breast cancer detection the CompuMAINE Lab has been in the news in multiple ways:

2019 Dec: CompuMAINE lab member Brian Toner received his PhD in Computer Science. Click here for his PhD Dissertation.

2019 Dec: Dr Khalil attended and presented a poster of our latest longitudinal analysis of mammographic tissue disruption at the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. 

2019 May: Our second paper on the fractal nature of Pascal’s triangle was published in the journal Fractals: On the relative frequency of residue classes in Pascal’s triangle modulo a prime. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218348X19500981

2018 09 12: In collaboration with colleagues at The Jackson Laboratory, Dr. Khalil co-authored a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled DSCAM promotes self-avoidance in the developing mouse retina by masking the functions of cadherin superfamily members. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809430115

2018 05 15: Another major lab milestone was achieved with the acceptance of our manuscript “The box-counting dimension of Pascal’s triangle r mod p” in the journal Fractals. Congratulations to authors D. Bradley, E. Ossanna, R. Niemeyer, and A. Khalil.

2018 05 01: The National Institutes of Health awarded ~$425K for a project on the role of G-alpha signaling in gradient tracking. Dr. Khalil is a co-PI on this project. Kelley – Khalil receive NIH grant

2018 05 01: NASA awarded ~$300K for a project on the quantification and analysis of Greenland glacier and ice cap discharge using automated Landsat terminus change time series and NADA data products. Dr. Khalil is a co-PI on this project.

2018 04 30: Undergrad lab member Dan D’Alessio has accepted an offer to start his graduate studies an industrial and applied mathematics at Utah State. Congratulations Dan!

2018 01 01: Dr. Khalil is now a member of the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at UMaine and will no longer be in Mathematics and Statistics.

2017 10 27: Undergrad lab member Dan D’Alessio received a $1,000 fellowship from the UMaine CUGR (Center for undergraduate research). Congratulations Dan!

2017 09 13: Another major lab milestone was achieved with the publication in the journal Methods of our manuscript Wavelet-based tracking of bacteria in unreconstructed off-axis holograms.

2017 09 01: The National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation program awarded ~$500K towards the acquisition of a digital light sheet microscope Leica TCS SP8 DLS. Dr. Khalil is a co-PI on this project.

2017 05 14: Nice article by Lindsay Tice from the Sun Journal, on cutting-edge research being done right here in Maine, describing “10 of the most promising projects in Maine”. One of these projects (at the end of the article) discusses our breast cancer research.

2017 04 30: Presentation of a poster on wavelet-based tracking of bacteria in unreconstructed off-axis holograms at the Maine Biological and Medical Sciences Symposium.

2017 04 30: High school lab member Clara Bradley accepted an offer to start her university studies in bioengineering at Stanford University. Congratulations Clara!.

2017 04 25: Through the University of Maine Faculty Research Funds program, Dr. Khalil was awarded a 2017 Summer Faculty Research Award for work on Wavelet Leaders vs. the Wavelet Transform Modulus Maxima Method.

2017 04 22: Dr. Khalil gave a short speech at the UMaine Marches for Science event. Here is a clip of the speech.

2017 04 21: Our paper Computational growth model of breast microcalcification clusters in simulated mammographic environments, published in Computers in Biology and Medicine, was given the honors status. Out of ~1,500 papers submitted to this journal in 2016, ~300 were accepted for publication, and amongst the top-ranked 80 out of the 300, ours was listed as “meritorious” and ranked as 38.

2017 04 01: Graduate student lab member Zach Marin accepted a PhD position in biomedical engineering at Yale University. Congratulations Zach! Click here for his MA Thesis.

2017 03 14: Through the NVIDIA GPU Grant Program, we were awarded a powerful Titan X Pascal graphics card to help accelerate our wavelet-transform calculations.

2017 03 14: A major lab milestone was achieved with the publication in Medical Physics of our manuscript “Mammographic evidence of microenvironment changes in tumorous breasts“.

2017 03 11: Faculty lab member Rob Niemeyer accepted a position as assistant professor of mathematics at the University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, TX. Congratulations Rob!