Director of Graduate Studies
Professor
Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering

Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Biography

Before joining Cornell University in July 2006, Peter Doerschuk was on the faculty of Purdue University in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School. After post-graduate training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital he held a post-doctoral appointment at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (MIT) before joining Purdue.

Peter Doerschuk’s research concerns biological and medical systems from the view point of computational nonlinear stochastic systems. In particular, he has contributed to computational inverse problems for biophysics, statistical image processing, and biomedical and speech signal processing. In each of these areas, important goals of his work have been to incorporate accurate physical models while at the same time developing computationally practical algorithms implemented in high-performance software systems.

A wide range of spatial and temporal scales is represented in his research. At the smallest spatial scale, in collaboration with Professor J. E. Johnson (The Scripps Research Institute), he has developed algorithms and parallel software for problems associated with determining the 3-D shape of viruses from electron microscopy images and x-ray scattering data. Parallel software has played a critical role in solving these problems. At the largest spatial scale, in collaboration with Professor S. J. O’Connor (Indiana University School of Medicine), he has developed nonlinear differential equation models of the pharmacokinetics of ethanol. He has used these models to develop signal processing and pattern recognition algorithms and software for processing the outputs of a long-term implanted ethanol sensor system and to determine parameters describing the ethanol-related physiology of an individual from breath ethanol measurements.

Research Interests

• Artificial Intelligence
• Algorithms
• Bioengineering
• Biomedical Engineering
• Biomedical Imaging and Instrumentation
• Complex Systems, Network Science and Computation
• Computer Aided Diagnosis
• Computational Science and Engineering
• Image Analysis
• Signal and Image Processing
• Scientific Computing
• Remote Sensing
• Statistics and Machine Learning
• Bio-Electrical Engineering
• Systems and Networking

Selected Publications

• Plawecki, M H., U S. Zimmermann, V. Vitvitskiy, P C. Doerschuk, D. Crabb, S O’Connor. 2012. “Alcohol exposure rate control through physiologically based pharmacokinetic modeling.” Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research 36 (6): 1042-1049.
• Zheng, Y., Q. Wang, P C Doerschuk. 2012. “Three-dimensional reconstruction of the statistics of heterogeneous objects from a collection of one projection image of each object.” Journal of the Optical Society of America A-Optics Image Science and Vision 29 (6): 959-970.
• Santisakultarm, T P., N R. Cornelius, N. Nishimura, A I. Schafer, R T. Silver, P C. Doerschuk, W L. Olbricht, C B Schaffer. 2012. “In vivo two-photon excited fluorescence microscopy reveals cardiac- and respiration-dependent pulsatile blood flow in cortical blood vessels in mice.” American Journal of Physiology. Heart and Circulatory Physiology 302 (7): H1367-H1377.
• Wang, Q., T. Matsui, T. Domitrovic, Y. Zheng, P C. Doerschuk, J E Johnson. 2013. “Dynamics in cryo EM reconstructions visualized with maximum-likelihood derived variance maps.” J Struct Biol 181 (3): 195-206.
• Gong, Yunye, Peter Doerschuk. 2016. “3-D understanding of electron microscopy images of nano bio objects by computing generative mechanical models.” Paper presented at IEEE 2016 International Conference on Image Processing, Phoenix AZ, September 25.

Selected Awards and Honors

• Ernst A. Guillemin Thesis Prize for the MIT EECS M.Eng. thesis of Keyuan Xu, (MIT EECS) 2004
• The Motorola Excellence in Teaching Award (Purdue University – School of Electrical & Computer Engineering) 2004
• Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) 2003
• University Faculty Scholar (Purdue University) 2002
• Department of Biomedical Engineering Faculty Service Award (Purdue University) 2000

Education

• B.S.E.E. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1977
• M.S.E.E. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979
• E.E. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979
• Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985
• M.D. (Medicine), Harvard Medical School, 1987