My Unexpected Journey in Applied Biomathematics: Morphometrics, the Singular-value Decomposition, and Death Row

Fred Bookstein
Universities of Vienna, Michigan, and Washington

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     Last modified: June 14, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 11:00 AM in MACK 237
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Abstract
The session presents and discusses one morphometrician's
unexpected journey in applied biomathematics.

Fred L. Bookstein's topic is what used to be called Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, now Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Twenty years ago Fred joined a small academic
research project in Seattle that needed help with biostatistical methodology. The collaboration proved much more productive for the methodologist than for the scientist: findings were routine, with lots of publications but no breakthroughs. Separately, Fred was developing modern
morphometrics in the rather different scientific context of evolutionary and developmental biology.

In the mid-1990's, "supported by a risk tolerance at the US National Institutes of Health that has since evaporated," as Fred insists, he and his collaborators were able to fuse these
two lines of work and in fact to establish an "endophrenology" of FASD. The corpus callosum is a brain part quite easy to measure from images, and its
shape is quite sensitive to damage from prenatal alcohol. The damage is strongly correlated with particular profiles of behavioral deficit, specifically the kinds of behavior deficits that get FASD patients into serious legal trouble in the United States. Just since 2001, this work has spun off new and practical screening protocols for visible brain damage in
exposed newborn babies, and equally practical methods for interfering with some American executions of convicted murders who have clear organic brain damage due to the same prenatal exposures. The fine match between a fully
biomathematical pattern engine and an emerging clinical medical imperative transformed a merely academic exercise into a splendid example of applied biomathematics as knowledge engineering.

Session structure:

Fred L. Bookstein: "My Unexpected Journey in Applied Biomathematics: Morphometrics, the Singular-value Decomposition, and Death Row" (30')

Werner Callebaut: Introduction of the discussion (5')
Jason Scott Robert — first discussant (15')
Peter Taylor - second discussant (15')

Fred L. Bookstein: Reply (15')

General discussion (10')

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
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My Unexpected Journey in Applied Biomathematics: Morphometrics, the Singular-value Decomposition, and Death Row