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Milan Sonka, PhD

Contact Information

Office: 3016 SC
Phone: 319-335-5191
Faculty Profile


Brief description of current research:

Dr. Sonka's research interests include medical imaging and knowledge-based image analysis with emphasis on cardiovascular, pulmonary, orthopaedic, brain, cancer, and ophthalmic image analysis. He is the first author of 4 editions of Image Processing, Analysis and Machine Vision book (1993, 1998, 2008, 2014) and co-authored or co-edited 20 books/proceedings. He has published more than 180 journal papers and over 430 other publications. He is past Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (2008-2014) and member of the Editorial Board of the Medical Image Analysis journal.  To bring results of his research work to clinical practice, he has co-founded two medical imaging companies -- Medical Imaging Applications LLC, and VIDA Diagnostics Inc.

3 most influential diabetes/obesity/metabolism publications:

  • van Dijk HW, Verbraak FD, Stehouwer M, Kok PH, Garvin MK, Sonka M, DeVries JH, Schlingemann RO, Abramoff MD. "Association of visual function and ganglion cell layer thickness in patients with diabetes mellitus type 1 and no or minimal diabetic retinopathy." Vision Res. 51(2):224-8, 2011.
  • Sohn, EH, van Dijk, HW, Jiao, C, Kok, PH, Jeong, W, Demirkaya, N, Garmager, A, Wit, F, Kucukevcilioglu, M, van Velthoven, ME, DeVries, JH, Mullins, RF, Kuehn, MH, Schlingemann, RO, Sonka, M, Verbraak, FD, Abramoff, MD (2016). Retinal neurodegeneration may precede microvascular changes characteristic of diabetic retinopathy in diabetes mellitus. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., U.S.A., 113, 19:E2655-64.
  • L Zhang, A Wahle, Z Chen, JJ Lopez, T Kovarnik, M Sonka: Predicting Locations of High-Risk Plaques in Coronary Arteries in Patients Receiving Statin Therapy (2018), IEEE transactions on medical imaging 37 (1), 151-161, e-pub ahead of print