Image Segmentation and Shape Analysis of Blood Vessels with Applications to Coronary Atherosclerosis

To my parents Chen, Kaixuan and Yang, Jisheng, and my husband Tinghao. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank those who have been supporting me and helping me throughout my doctorate years. Allen Tannenbaum for your invaluable guidance throughout my study and research at Georgia Tech. It has been a privilege to be a student of yours, to learn from you and to be inspired by you. I am so grateful to have had such great advisors who not only have incredible foresight and view of the big picture, but also guided me through numerous technical details. I would like to thank my thesis reading committee, Professor Ray Vito, Professor Anthony Yezzi and Professor John Oshinski for your helpful comments and suggestions, which improved my thesis in many aspects. Thanks to Dr. Arthur Stillman for teaching me useful knowledge in medicine, sending me many real-world clinical data sets, and helping me with the validation of the algorithms. Thank you to everyone who is currently in the Biomedical Imaging Lab and who have been heresimiliano, Sungho and Annica. I have learned much from each and everyone of you, and it's always been a pleasure to spend time in the lab, attend group meetings, and share the knowledge and happiness with you. I would also like to thank my intern supervisors, Gozde Unal at Siemens Corporate Research and Zhujiang Cao at Vital Images, for being great mentors to me and guiding me through two wonderful internship experiences. I have learned so much from you which I couldn't have learned at school. iv To my dear husband Tinghao, your love and support have been keeping me warm at heart for so many years. I cherish all the memories we have had together, and I look forward to creating and sharing many more new memories with you. Thanks to my parents and every family member in China, for supporting me unconditionally all the time. The distance across half of the earth will never separate you and me. The last but not least, thanks to every Chinese friend I have met in the US, it's you who have made this place another home away from home.