Professor and Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor, Biomedical Engineering (By Courtesy)
Bio
B.S. Electrical Engineering, Virginia Tech, 1988M.S. Electrical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 1990Ph.D. Electrical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 1993
Professor Acton’s laboratory at UVA is called VIVA - Virginia Image and Video Analysis. They specialize in biological image analysis problems. The research emphases of VIVA include tracking, segmentation, representation, retrieval, classification and enhancement. Professor Acton has over 275 publications in the image analysis area. His recent professional service includes Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and General Co-Chair of the IEEE International Symposisum on Biomedical Imaging.
Aging vessels connecting the brain and the immune system play critical roles in both Alzheimer’s disease and the decline in cognitive ability that comes with time, new research reveals. By improving the function of the lymphatic vessels, scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have dramatically enhanced aged mice’s ability to learn and improved their memories. The work may provide doctors an entirely new path to treat or prevent Alzheimer’s disease, age-related memory loss and other neurodegenerative diseases.
The research is the latest from the lab of pioneering neuroscientist Jonathan Kipnis, whose team discovered in 2015 that the brain is surrounded by lymphatic vessels – vessels science textbooks insisted did not exist.
When UVA Electrical Engineer Scott Acton crossed paths with UVA neuroscientist Jonathan Kipnis at a medical research retreat, collaborative sparks flew. It took them less than an hour to outline several exciting projects that could apply Professor Acton’s biomedical imaging analysis techniques to Dr. Kipnis’ groundbreaking work on the newly discovered lymphatic system in the brain.
The identification of the brain’s lymphatic system—which was once unknown—is one of the largest and surprising discoveries in modern medicine. And although Kipnis’ discovery is exciting enough, it’s just the beginning. Research into this newfound area promises to help solve the mysteries of devastating neuro-immune disorders like Alzheimer’s and autism that are still incurable.
One of the main components in researching brain immune disorders is getting quantifiable data that answers basic but essential questions about what causes change in the brain. Such changes may be due to a drug, an environment, or a gene. That’s where biomedical image analysis becomes crucial, because it can measure minute changes in the brain’s complex components, such as neurons, parts of neurons, and connective tissue, and start to get answers.
Ultimately, through a bold venture known as embedding, Acton joined Kipnis’ team to begin the journey of charting nothing less than a new frontier of the human brain.
Functional aspects of meningeal lymphatics in ageing and Alzheimer’s disease. Nature, vol. 560, pp. 185-191, 2018. ABSSandro Da Mesquita, Antoine Louveau, Andrea Vaccari, ..., Scott T. Acton, Jonathan Kipnis
SDL: Saliency-based dictionary learning framework for image similarity. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing,” vol. 27, pp. 749-763, 2018. ABSR. Sarkar, Scott T. Acton
Farewell editiorial. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing,” vol. 27, pp. 8-9, 2018. ABSScott T. Acton
Speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 11, 1260-1270, 2002. ABSYongjian Yu, Scott T. Acton
Active Contour External Force Using Vector Field Convolution for Image Segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 16, pp. 2096-2097, 2007. ABSBing Li, Scott T. Acton
