A joint newsletter of the Statistical Computing &Statistical Graphics Sections of the American Statistical Association.
December 96 Vol.7 No.3
A WORD FROM OUR CHAIRS SPECIAL FEATURE ARTICLE Statistical Computing Computational Anatomy: An Emerging Discipline This is Sallie Keller-McNulty'slast By Ulf Grenander and Michael I. Miller column as 1996 Chair of the Statis- tical Computing Section. The edi- The last several decades have witnessed a revolutionary tors would like to thank her for her change in medical imaging. New imaging instrumenta- contributions to the newsletter. tion has transformed the ®eld from one that was dom- This is my ®nal column as your Section Chair. I am inated by the time honored ¯at Xrays to a quickly ex- pleased to say that I have now placed the leadership of panding technology with powerful tools like MRI (Mag- the Statistical Computing Section in the able hands of netic Resonance Imaging), PET (Positron Emission To- Daryl Pregibon. Some of our other new Section Of®cers mography ) and SPECT (Single Photon Emission Com- that will be performing important functions for the Sec- puted Tomography ) to mention but a few. This has rad- tion this coming year are James Marron, our new Pub- ically changed the diagnosticians' ability to acquire pa- lication Liaison; Russell Wol®nger, the 1998 Joint Sta- tient data with more or less non-invasive procedures. tistical Meetings (JSM) Section Program Chair; Karen Some sensors, for example ultra sound, produce very Kafadar our Section Chair-Elect; and our new Council noisy data; others like MR have a better signal-to-noise of Sections Representatives, Naomi Altman and Terry ratio. In both cases the presence of randomness ne- Therneau. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 cessitates statistical treatment, but it should be empha- sized that the main dif®culty is not due to noise, whose Statistical Graphics probabilistic properties can be derived from the physics of the sensor with some degree of accuracy. Instead William DuMouchel is the outgo- the overwhelming challenge facing the analyst of data ing 1996 Chair of the Statisti- from medical imaging is understanding the randomness cal Graphics Secion. The editors that represents biological variability. This is more terra would like to thank him for his help incognita than noise analysis, although pioneering work in providing this column during the was done as early as the 1970's by Bookstein (1978) past year. and others studying shape change. Today an increasing number of mathematicians, statisticians, anatomists and As my year as Chair of the Statistical Graphics Section radiologists are exploring the new discipline computa- ends, I would like to thank all the of®cers of the Section tional anatomy. for working so hard during the year to make our activi- ties successful. Many of them deserve special mention: Statisticians are wont to complain about the scarcity of Stephen Eick organized and shepherded a great program data, but computational anatomy should be the statisti-
for last August's meetings in Chicago. Dianne Cook, cians El Dorado, since data come in huge quantities, es-
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