A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Nicholas Ayache is a Research Director at INRIA (French Research Institute in Computer Science and Automatic Control), Sophia-Antipolis, France, where he was the scientific leader of the EPIDAURE research group on medical image analysis and robotics between 1993 and 2005, and has been the leader of the ASCLEPIOS research group on biomedical image analysis and simulation since November 2005. He is currently teaching graduate courses in Computer Vision and Medical Imaging at Ecole Centrale Paris and Ecole Normale Supérieure (Cachan), and was previously teaching at the Universities of Paris XI and Nice-Sophia Antipolis. Since 1984, he has been a scientific consultant for several industrial companies or international research institutes, and participated in the creation of several start-up companies in image processing, computer vision, and biomedical imaging.

Dr. Ayache received his Ph.D in 1983, and his "Thèse d'Etat" in 1988, both in computer science, from the University of Paris XI, on the development of vision cababilities for autonomous robots, more precisely on topics related to model based object recognition, passive stereovision, and multisensor fusion. Since 1988, Dr. Ayache's research interests have been in Biomedical Image Analysis and Simulation including the analysis of medical and biological images with advanced geometrical, statistical, physical and functional models, the simulation of physiological systems with computational models built from biomedical images and other signals, and the application of these tools to medicine and biology to better assist prevention, diagnosis and therapy of diseases. He has also been involved in the design of innovative systems for surgery simulation and image-guided therapy. Dr. Nicholas Ayache is the author and co-author of more than 200 scientific publications in these domains.

Dr. Ayache has several editorial responsabilities : he is the co-founder and co-Editor in Chief of the scientific journal Medical Image Analysis (Elsevier), an Associate Editor of Transactions on Medical Imaging (IEEE), a member of the editorial board of Computer Assisted Surgery (Wiley), and Medical Imaging Technology (Japanese Society of Medical Imaging). He is Editor of the book "Computational Models for the Human Body" published by Elsevier in 2004 as a special volume of the series "Handbook of Numerical Analysis". He was associate editor of the Int. Journal of Computer Vision (Kluwer, 1992-2004), advisory editor of Videre-Computer Vision Research Journal (MIT-Press, 1996-2000), and associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation (1988-93).

Dr. Ayache is the author of the book Artificial Vision for Mobile Robots (MIT-Press) ( "Vision stéréoscopique et perception multisensorielle", Inter-Editions) and Editor of the book "Computational Models for the Human Body". He chaired the first International Conference on Computer Vision, Virtual Reality, and Robotics in Medicine (CVRMed) held in Nice in April 1995, and co-chaired the First Symposium on Surgery Simulation and Soft Tissue Modeling in 2003. Dr Ayache has been serving on the editorial board of major conferences in Medical Imaging, Computer Vision, Visualisation, and Robotics including MICCAI, ISBI, CVPR, ECCV and ICCV.