Anand Santhanam, PhD
Associate Professor
Dr. Santhanam's focus is on developing algorithms and techniques that cater to the requirements of medicine. In particular, he worked on the biomechanical modeling of lungs since 2002 for different applications ranging from computer animation, virtual reality, rehabilitation, tissue engineering to radiation oncology. His PhD dissertation was focused on developing High Performance Computing based algorithms for physics and physiology based 3D lung dynamics using state-of-art Graphics Processing Units (GPU) under the co-direction of Professor Jannick Rolland (currently at the University of Rochester, NY) and Dr. Sumanta Pattanaik (currently at the University of Central Florida) from August 2002 to May 2006. He also received the Link Foundation Fellowship award for his research during the year 2005. Dr. Santhanam was the University of Central Florida’s principal investigator of Florida James and Esther King 2008-10 Team Science Project grant for $1 Million in collaboration with the MD Anderson Cancer Center Orlando, which focuses on incorporating 3D biomechanical lung dynamic models for assessing the treatment efficacy of lung radiotherapy. Dr. Santhanam’s current research focus is on developing single GPU and multi-GPU accelerated algorithms for 3D/4D image processing, model based lung registration, anatomy deformation modeling, deformation based elasticity estimation, tumor dosimetry and lung deformation based radiotherapy evaluation. He has published several journal publications in the field of biomechanical organ modeling.