Faculty

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics from Harvey Mudd College, Dr. Gifford went on to earn his doctoral degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Arizona. He came to UH from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he worked initially as a postdoctoral fellow and ultimately as an associate professor of radiology. He joined the UH Biomedical Engineering Department as an associate professor in January 2012. His research interests relate to biomedical image formation and system design, exploring how humans extract information from images. With humans as the final interpreters for many imaging applications, there are strong motivations to understand how extracted information is used to form decisions. Specific areas of interest include planar and tomographic radiological imaging with gamma rays and X-rays as well as multi-modality applications that combine functional and anatomical imaging. Dr. Gifford's professional memberships include SPIE and the Medical Imaging Perception Society.
Image formation and reconstruction for medical imaging; objective assessment of imaging systems; visual perception and sources of observer variability; image classification and pattern recognition; statistical decision and estimation theory; parallel-computing applications in imaging.
Selected Publications
- Addition of a threshold mechanism to model observers for medical image quality assessment - H Lin, HC Gifford - Proc SPIE 12929, 59-63, 2024
- An assessment of PET dose reduction with penalized likelihood image reconstruction using a computationally efficient model observer - HC Gifford, CR Schmidtlein, A Krol, Y Xu - Medical Imaging 2020: Physics of Medical Imaging 11312, 192-198
- Assessing CT acquisition parameters with visual-search model observers - Z Karbaschi, HC Gifford - Journal of Medical Imaging 5 (2), 025501-025501
- Accounting for anatomical noise in tumor localization tasks with visual-search and channelized Hotelling observers - A Sen, HC Gifford - Journal of Medical Imaging 3, 015502
- Visual‐search observers for assessing tomographic x‐ray image quality - HC Gifford, Z Liang, M Das - Medical physics 43 (3), 1563-1575