PhD-student Alize Scheenstra (LKEB, LUMC) has been awarded the best poster prize at the conference “Information Processing in Medical Imaging(IPMI)” 2009. Being one of the most selective and influential conferences on principled mathematical methods in biomedical image analysis, this is a highly prestigious award, and a remarkable achievement.

Alize presented her work on the statistical analysis of deformation fields. She presented the nonparametric 3D Moore-Rayleigh test. This test can quantify group differences, so no iterative method is needed. She has shown on simulated and clinical data that this test has equal performance to iterative methods such as permutation tests. Furthermore, for small sample sizes the Moore-Rayleigh test can outperform the permutation tests. With this test, the calculation time of quantitative group analysis can be 10 times faster, which makes this test very suitable for the clinical applications.