Dimitris Anastassiou

Last updated
Dimitris Anastassiou
Born1952
Athens, Greece
Nationality Greek, American
Alma mater National Technical University of Athens
University of California, Berkeley
Known for MPEG-2 technology
Awards IEEE Fellow
Scientific career
Fields Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Systems Biology
Institutions Columbia University

Dimitris Anastassiou is an electrical engineer and Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Columbia University School of Engineering. Anastassiou's earlier work focuses primarily on signal and information processing and reverse engineering. His more recent work involves interdisciplinary research, specifically in systems biology, with investigators at Columbia University Medical Center. Anastassiou is Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to video technology, developing high-performance digital image and video coding techniques [1] . He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and recipient of both the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award.

Contents

Anastassiou has made significant advances in the areas of digital technology. His research resulted in Columbia being the only university to hold patent in MPEG-2 technology, a crucial technique used in all types of digital televisions, DVDs, satellite TV, HDTV, digital cable systems, computer video, and other interactive media. [2] [3]

In 2013, a team led by Anastassiou won the DREAM Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge with a genetic model that could predict cancer prognoses with 76% accuracy. [4]

Early life and education

Anastassiou was born in Athens, Greece in 1952. He received his Bachelor of Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. [5] Upon moving to the United States, Anastassiou earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. [6] [5]

Career

Electrical engineering (1979-1990s)

Dimitris Anastassiou is widely recognized in the engineering community. He is an IEEE Fellow, the recipient of IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator. [6] Anastassiou is also the recipient of the Columbia University Great Teacher Award. [6]

Between 1979 and 1983, Dimitris Anastassiou was a Research Staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. [6] While at IBM, Anastassiou worked on the development of IBM videoconference software. [5] In 1983, Anastassiou joined the faculty of Columbia University. [6]

Anastassiou was the former director of Columbia University's Image and Advanced Television Laboratory and director of Columbia University's Genomic Information Systems Laboratory. He came to national prominence when he, with his student Fermi Wang developed the MPEG-2 algorithm for transmitting high quality audio and video over limited bandwidth in the early 1990s. [7] [8] [9] As a result of his MPEG patent, Columbia University became the only university in the MPEG LA patent pool. Revenue from the patent pool allowed Anastassiou to pursue interdisciplinary research in other areas. [7]

Transition to systems biology (2000s)

In the early 2000s, Anastassiou moved away from his previous work in DVDs and compression and into Systems Biology. [2] Anastassiou refers to his publications in engineering and signal processing as those from a "previous lifetime". [3] Anastassiou is currently a faculty member of the Center for the Multiscale Analysis of Genomic and Cellular Networks. [6]

In 2009, Anastassiou won an $800,000 award from the National Institute of Health jointly with Maria Karayiorgou of Columbia University Medical Center for a project entitled "Computational discovery of synergistic mechanisms responsible for psychiatric disorders", aiming to discover the biological mechanisms of psychological disorders such as schizophrenia. [10] The project aims to investigate genetic variations based on genome-wide association data for psychiatric disorders to elucidate genetic mechanisms behind schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. [10]

In 2013, Anastassiou was inducted as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. As of 2013, Dimitris Anastassiou holds 14 U.S. and 8 international patents, which have so far generated up to $100 million in revenues for Columbia University. [11] [7]

Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge

In 2013, a team led by Anastassiou won the Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge (BCC), run by Sage Bionetworks and Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods (DREAM), which challenged teams to develop models to predict breast cancer survival rates based on a large gene expression and clinical feature dataset. [12] Anastassiou's team won the challenge despite being smaller and despite competing against teams from companies such as IBM, by taking an approach that was "out-of-the-box" and "completely novel". [13]

His group's submission used a model which relied on the signatures of three metagenes, which Anastassiou's group had previously associated with several cancers. Prior to the challenge, Anastassiou had been doing research on attractor metagenes, genetic signatures expressed nearly identically between different cancers. [2] The model predicts with 76 percent accuracy which of two breast cancer patients will live longer, which is far better than any models previously available. [13]

Of the results, Anastassiou said:

These signatures manifest themselves in specific genes that are turned on together in the tissues of some patients in many different cancer types... If these general cancer signatures are useful in breast cancer, as we proved in this challenge, then why not in other types of cancer as well? I think that the most significant -- and exciting -- implication of our work is the hope that these signatures can be used for improved diagnostic, prognostic, and eventually, therapeutic products, applicable to multiple cancers. [2]

The findings from the competition were published in Science Translational Medicine. [14] While the results are not yet ready for clinical use, [15] Anastassiou's group is currently working to extend these findings to predict whether patients need further treatment. [16] [15]

The research for the competition was partially funded by Anastassiou's patents in DVD encoding. [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert H. Dennard</span> American electrical engineer (born 1932)

Robert Heath Dennard was an American electrical engineer and inventor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Personalized medicine</span> Medical model that tailors medical practices to the individual patient

Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, is a medical model that separates people into different groups—with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products being tailored to the individual patient based on their predicted response or risk of disease. The terms personalized medicine, precision medicine, stratified medicine and P4 medicine are used interchangeably to describe this concept, though some authors and organizations differentiate between these expressions based on particular nuances. P4 is short for "predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Pestell</span> Australian oncologist and endocrinologist

Richard G. Pestell is an Australian American oncologist and endocrinologist who is Distinguished Professor, Translational Medical Research, and the President of the Pennsylvania Cancer and Regenerative Medicine Research Center at the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute. He was previously Executive Vice President of Thomas Jefferson University and Director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center of Thomas Jefferson University. Pestell was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours for distinguished service to medicine and medical education.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erich Bloch</span> American electrical engineer (1925–2016)

Erich Bloch was a German-born American electrical engineer and administrator. He was involved with developing IBM's first transistorized supercomputer, 7030 Stretch, and mainframe computer, System/360. He served as director of the National Science Foundation from 1984 to 1990.

Breast cancer classification divides breast cancer into categories according to different schemes criteria and serving a different purpose. The major categories are the histopathological type, the grade of the tumor, the stage of the tumor, and the expression of proteins and genes. As knowledge of cancer cell biology develops these classifications are updated.

A gene signature or gene expression signature is a single or combined group of genes in a cell with a uniquely characteristic pattern of gene expression that occurs as a result of an altered or unaltered biological process or pathogenic medical condition. This is not to be confused with the concept of gene expression profiling. Activating pathways in a regular physiological process or a physiological response to a stimulus results in a cascade of signal transduction and interactions that elicit altered levels of gene expression, which is classified as the gene signature of that physiological process or response. The clinical applications of gene signatures breakdown into prognostic, diagnostic and predictive signatures. The phenotypes that may theoretically be defined by a gene expression signature range from those that predict the survival or prognosis of an individual with a disease, those that are used to differentiate between different subtypes of a disease, to those that predict activation of a particular pathway. Ideally, gene signatures can be used to select a group of patients for whom a particular treatment will be effective.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feniosky Peña-Mora</span> Dominican enginner and educator

Feniosky Peña-Mora is a Dominican-born engineer, educator, and former commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction. He also served as the 14th Dean of Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science and as the Associate Provost of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Friend</span>

Stephen H. Friend is co-founder and director of Sage Bionetworks.

V Ramgopal Rao is an Indian academic currently serving as the Group Vice Chancellor of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani for campuses located in Pilani, Dubai, Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai. He was previously the Director of IIT, Delhi for six years during 2016-2021.

Rajiv V. Joshi is an Indian-American prolific inventor and research staff member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. His work focuses on the development of integrated circuits and memory chips. He is an IEEE Fellow and received the Industrial Pioneer Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2013 and the IEEE Daniel E. Noble Award in 2018. He holds 271 U.S. patents.

In the field of medicine, radiomics is a method that extracts a large number of features from medical images using data-characterisation algorithms. These features, termed radiomic features, have the potential to uncover tumoral patterns and characteristics that fail to be appreciated by the naked eye. The hypothesis of radiomics is that the distinctive imaging features between disease forms may be useful for predicting prognosis and therapeutic response for various cancer types, thus providing valuable information for personalized therapy. Radiomics emerged from the medical fields of radiology and oncology and is the most advanced in applications within these fields. However, the technique can be applied to any medical study where a pathological process can be imaged.

Maryellen L. Giger, is an American physicist and radiologist who has made significant contributions to the field of medical imaging.

Anant Madabhushi is the Donnell Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio, USA and founding director of CWRU's Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD). He is also a Research Scientist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in Cleveland, OH, USA. He holds secondary appointments in the Case Western Reserve University departments of Urology, Radiology, Pathology, Radiation Oncology, General Medical Sciences, Computer & Data Sciences, and Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael J. Carey (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist

Michael James Carey is an American computer scientist. He is currently a Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School at the University of California, Irvine and a Consulting Architect at Couchbase, Inc..

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan L. Mitchell</span> American computer scientist and inventor

Joan Laverne Mitchell was an American computer scientist, data compression pioneer, and inventor who, as a researcher at IBM, co-invented the JPEG digital image format.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Merative</span> U.S. healthcare company

Merative L.P., formerly IBM Watson Health, is an American medical technology company that provides products and services that help clients facilitate medical research, clinical research, real world evidence, and healthcare services, through the use of artificial intelligence, data analytics, cloud computing, and other advanced information technology. Merative is owned by Francisco Partners, an American private equity firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. In 2022, IBM divested and spun-off their Watson Health division into Merative. As of 2023, it remains a standalone company headquartered in Ann Arbor with innovation centers in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai.

Gustavo A. Stolovitzky is an Argentine-American computational systems biologist. He was the CSO of Sema4 and then of GeneDx until December 2023. Between 1998 and 2021 he was a researcher and executive at IBM Research. At IBM he served in several roles including Founding Chair of the Exploratory Life Sciences Council and Director of the Translational Systems Biology and Nano-Biotechnology Program at IBM Research. From 2013 to 2018 he was Adjunct professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and from 2007 he has been an Adjunct Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. His research has been cited more than 29,000 times

Sherene Loi is an Australian oncologist. She is the 2021 winner of the Australian Prime Ministers Prize for Science, in the category of Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year. Loi is Head of Translational Breast Cancer Research, within the Peter Macallum Cancer Centre. Loi's research has advanced understanding into breast cancer, developing and implementing an immune system biomarker. This biomarker will enable improved management for people with advanced cancer. This biomarker is now part of routine pathology reporting across many countries and also is included in the World Health Organization Classification of Tumours.

DREAM Challenges is a non-profit initiative for advancing biomedical and systems biology research via crowd-sourced competitions. Started in 2006, DREAM challenges collaborate with Sage Bionetworks to provide a platform for competitions run on the Synapse platform. Over 60 DREAM challenges have been conducted over the span of over 15 years.

Dinesh Verma FREng is an Indian-born American computer scientist. He is an IBM Fellow working at IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY where he conducts research on technologies at the intersection of the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Systems. He concurrently serves as the Technical Committee Chair/Chief Technology Officer of Enterprise Neurosystems Group, an open-source consortium focused on distributed enterprise AI.

References

  1. ↑ "IEEE Fellows 1998 | IEEE Communications Society".
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Moore, Elizabeth Armstrong (18 April 2013). "A new way to predict breast cancer survival". CNET. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  3. 1 2 Evarts, Holly. "New Computational Model Can Predict Breast Cancer Survival". Columbia Engineering. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  4. ↑ McCarthy, Nicola (May 2013). "Rising to the challenge". Nature Reviews Cancer. 13 (6): 378. doi: 10.1038/nrc3530 . PMID   23640208. S2CID   205469727.
  5. 1 2 3 Anastassiou, Dimitris (June 1996). "High Definition Television". IEEE Communications Magazine. 34 (6): 108. doi:10.1109/MCOM.1996.506817. S2CID   40143089.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Dimitris Anastassiou Biography". Columbia Engineering. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 McCaughey, Robert (2014). A Lever Long Enough: A History of Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science Since 1864. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 198. ISBN   9780231166881.
  8. ↑ "Modern Greece: Science and Technology". Hellenica World. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  9. ↑ Peña-Moras, Feniosky. "Dean Feniosky Peña-Mora's Convocation Address". Columbia Engineering. Columbia University. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  10. 1 2 "Prof. Anastassiou Wins NIH Award". Columbia Engineering. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  11. ↑ Farmer, Melanie A. "National Academy of Inventors Taps Prof. Anastassiou as New Fellow". Columbia Engineering. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  12. ↑ "Two Science Translational Medicine Reports: DREAM and Sage Bionetworks Tap into the Wisdom of the Crowd to Fight the Challenge of Breast Cancer Prognosis and Treatment". Reuters. 17 April 2013. Archived from the original on 22 April 2016. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  13. 1 2 Swartz, Aimee (4 June 2013). "May the Best Model Win". The Scientist. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  14. ↑ Cheng, Wei-Yi; Yang, Tai-Hsien Ou; Anastassiou, Dimitris (17 April 2013). "Development of a Prognostic Model for Breast Cancer Survival in an Open Challenge Environment". Science Translational Medicine. 5 (181): 181. doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3005974 . PMID   23596202.
  15. 1 2 Rettner, Rachael (17 April 2013). "Breast Cancer Survival Predicted By Computer Model". Huffington Post. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
  16. ↑ Laino, Charlene. "Breast Cancer: 'Geek Sandbox' Holds Clues to Survival". MedPage. The Gupta Guide. Retrieved 11 April 2016.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.