Andy Worth started programming computers on an Apple ][ in basic and 6502 assembly language. His first official programming course in college was in FORTRAN using punch cards. Andy was always interested in getting computers to emulate what humans can do, and after an unsatisfactory dip into traditional artificial intelligence, Andy began exploring biologically inspired computation. His Masters thesis was, “A neural network for tactile sensing: The Hertzian contact problem.” He went on to study mathematical modeling of biological computation along with perceptual psychology and neuroscience. This training as a scientist on top of being an engineer led to work on the quantitative analysis of anatomy in MRI brain images. At Massachusetts General Hospital, Andy built expertise in medical image processing just as magnetic resonance technologies expanded into illuminating brain function (fMRI) and fiber bundle orientation (diffusion MRI).
In 1998, Andy founded Neuromorphometrics and with SBIR funding, launched a service for labeling neuroanatomy. As Chief Technological Officer, he develops software and optimizes manualy-guided and automated analyses of 3D medical images. Neuromorphometrics is building an ever-improving quantitative model of the structure of the living human brain. Understanding brain shape and variation is needed for neuronaviagation in brain sensing and stimulation. Andy is inspired by computational mechanisms found in nature and uses this to develop technologies that help understand natural computation.
Education
Postdoc (Research Fellow in Neurology) Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Postdoc (DAAD Fellowship) Cognitive Systems Group, Computer Science Department, Universität Hamburg, Germany, PhD in Cognitive & Neural Systems from Boston University, MS in Electrical Engineering University of California, Davis, BS in Computer Engineering from San José State University, Silicone Valley.
