Sandy Napel

Honors and Awards

• College of Fellows, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) (November 2009)

Professional Education

Web Site Links

• Home Page

Industry Relationships

Stanford is committed to ethical and transparent interactions with our industry partners. It is our policy to disclose payments of $5,000 or more, equity valued at $5,000 or more in a publicly traded company, or any equity in a privately held company, to physicians and scientists employed by Stanford University from companies or other commercial entities with which they interact as part of their professional activities. View Full Information

Research Interests

My primary interests are in developing diagnostic and therapy-planning applications and strategies for the acquisition, visualization and interpretation of multi-dimensional medical imaging data. Examples are: creation of three-dimensional images of blood vessels using CT, visualization of complex flow within blood vessels using MR, computer-aided detection and characterization of lesions (e.g., colonic polyps, pulmonary nodules) from cross-sectional image data, visualization and automated assessment of 4D ultrasound data, and fusion of images acquired using different modalities (e.g., CT and MR). I have also been involved in developing and evaluating techniques for exploring cross-sectional imaging data from an internal perspective, i.e., virtual endoscopy (including colonoscopy, angioscopy, and bronchoscopy), and in the quantitation of structure parameters, e.g., volumes, lengths, medial axes, and curvatures. Finally, I am also interested in creating workable solutions to the problem of "data explosion," i.e., how to look at the thousands of images generated per examination using modern CT and MR scanners.

Publications

• Dual-energy CT discrimination of iodine and calcium: experimental results and implications for lower extremity CT angiography. Tran DN, Straka M, Roos JE, Napel S, Fleischmann D. Acad Radiol. 2009; 16 (2): 160-71
• Lower extremity CT angiography (CTA): initial evaluation of a knowledge-based centerline estimation algorithm for femoro-popliteal artery (FPA) occlusions. Roos JE, Rakshe T, Tran DN, Rosenberg J, Straka M, El-Helw T, Sofilos MC, Napel S, Fleischmann D. Acad Radiol. 2009; 16 (6): 646-53
• Computer-aided detection (CAD) of lung nodules in CT scans: radiologist performance and reading time with incremental CAD assistance. Roos JE, Paik D, Olsen D, Liu EG, Chow LC, Leung AN, Mindelzun R, Choudhury KR, Naidich DP, Napel S, Rubin GD. Eur Radiol. 2009
• Improved speed of bone removal in computed tomographic angiography using automated targeted morphological separation: method and evaluation in computed tomographic angiography of lower extremity occlusive disease. Raman R, Raman B, Napel S, Rubin GD. J Comput Assist Tomogr. 2008 May-Jun; 32 (3): 485-91
• Adaptive border marching algorithm: automatic lung segmentation on chest CT images. Pu J, Roos J, Yi CA, Napel S, Rubin GD, Paik DS. Comput Med Imaging Graph. 2008; 32 (6): 452-62