David J Foran, Ph.D.

Dr. Foran is a Professor of Pathology & Radiology and Director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and The Cancer Institute of New Jersey. His research focuses on the design, development, and implementation of new approaches in computer-assisted diagnostics, medical imaging and statistical pattern recognition for resolving challenging clinical problems in pathology, radiology, and oncology.

A major concentration for his laboratory has been the development of a family of web-based data-mining technologies and computational methods for characterizing lymphoproliferative disorders and for elucidating the role that protein and molecular expression plays in determining the morphologic profiles exhibited by a wide range of malignancies. This research has led to the development of 1) an image-guided screening system for discriminating among commonly confused malignant lymphomas and leukemia; 2) a robotic system for performing automated imaging, evaluation, and archiving of tissue microarrays; 3) an automated means for 3-D detection, characterization, and tracking of hepatic neoplasms from spiral CT; and 4) a new approach for characterizing neuroanatomy from MR images using mathematical morphometry and cluster analysis. This work has resulted in numerous publications, invited book chapters and several pending and issued patents. Dr. Foran's research has been funded by the Whitaker Foundation, the NJ Commission on Science & Technology, the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense (DoD), the Radiological Society of North America, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the private sector.

He has served as a speaker and session chair for the IEEE international conferences for the engineering in medicine and biology society (EMBS), as the director and session chair for the scientific program for the annual conferences of the national Association for Pathology Informatics (API), as an invited speaker for the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP) and as an organizer and session chair for the World Conference on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Foran was recently selected to serve as a charter member on the Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics (BCHI) study section for the newly established National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He also serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, as an Associate Editor for the journal on Cancer Informatics and as a reviewer for the national Pathology Informatics Association, the American Medical Informatics Association, BMC Cancer, Archives in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.