Professor William Higgins

Vitae

To see information on Dr. Higgins's laboratory, visit: 
http://www.mipl.ee.psu.edu/

Dr. Higgins works in the areas of image processing, computer vision, and scientific visualization. His work focuses on applications in 3D medical imaging, radiology, 3D cardiopulmonary imaging, and endoscopy. His current primary emphasis is on virtual endoscopy and image-guided therapy systems. 

His laboratory has received considerable funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Whitaker Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and private industry. The laboratory has developed a number of interactive software systems for medical image analysis and computer-aided surgery. These systems constitute an integrated environment for 3D medical image analysis/visualization and virtual endoscopic exploration. These efforts have led to many publications and have received national attention in magazines such as Scientific American and Business Week. His group has also done much fundamental work in the areas of image segmentation, texture analysis, mathematical morphology, image registration, edge detection, volume rendering, 3D image interpolation, and image enhancement. He maintains active collaborations with groups at the Mayo Clinic and the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. Nearly 50 students have earned Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. honors degrees while working in his laboratory.  For more information, click on his laboratory's web site, given above. 

Dr. Higgins came to Penn State in 1989. Prior to 1989, he was a principal research fellow at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN (1987-1989), and he was a principal research scientist at the Honeywell Systems and Research Center, Minneapolis, MN (1984-1987). He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

He is affiliated with the Computer Science and Engineering department and the Bioengineering program. He teaches courses in image processing, computer vision, and signal processing. 

List of Publications