Biography | Publications
Mr. Avila received a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook specializing in 3D biomedical imaging and visualization. He has accumulated over 15 years of experience leading research and development projects in several academic and commercial settings including computing laboratories, basic science laboratories, and corporate research and development facilities. While employed at Howard Hughes Medical Institute he co-developed VolVis, an open source biomedical visualization system for confocal microscopy and medical research. He joined GE Global Research in 1994 and focused on developing visualization and analysis algorithms for clinical applications. He was a contributing author to "The Visualization Toolkit" textbook and co-developed the volume rendering architecture in VTK, a widely adopted open source toolkit for data visualization. He led the development of several key medical technology areas at GE including real-time visualization systems for medical scanners, medical image analysis and segmentation algorithms, and haptic rendering and display methods.

He is a contributing author on over 10 papers, has 10 issued and 6 pending patents, and has taught and organized numerous conference tutorials in the field of medical image analysis and visualization. In 2000, he received the Albert W. Hull Award, the highest award for early technical achievement given at GE Global Research. In 2003, he was selected by the National Academy of Engineering to attend the ninth annual Frontiers of Engineering Symposium as one of the nation’s top young engineers. He started and led the first Computer Aided Detection (CAD) program at GE Global Research from 2001 to 2005 and during this time Mr. Avila became a prominent and often invited speaker on the development of CAD algorithms for lung cancer management and other major diseases.

Mr. Avila joined Kitware in March 2005 as Director of Medical Applications where he is leading the development of open source imaging toolkits and products that significantly improve the effectiveness of healthcare, including image-guided intervention; quantitative disease and therapy assessment; and clinical image interpretation.

Publications