Dimitris Anastassiou

Dimitris Anastassiou is an electrical engineer and Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Columbia University School of Engineering. Anastassiou's earlier work focuses primarily on signal and information processing and reverse engineering. His more recent work involves interdisciplinary research, specifically in systems biology, with investigators at Columbia University Medical Center. Anastassiou is Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to video technology, developing high-performance digital image and video coding techniques . He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and recipient of both the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award.

Anastassiou has made significant advances in the areas of digital technology. His research resulted in Columbia being the only university to hold patent in MPEG-2 technology, a crucial technique used in all types of digital televisions, DVDs, satellite TV, HDTV, digital cable systems, computer video, and other interactive media.

In 2013, a team led by Anastassiou won the DREAM Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge with a genetic model that could predict cancer prognoses with 76% accuracy.

Early life and education Anastassiou was born in Athens, Greece in 1952. He received his Bachelor of Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. Anastassiou is also the recipient of the Columbia University Great Teacher Award. In 1983, Anastassiou joined the faculty of Columbia University. As a result of his MPEG patent, Columbia University became the only university in the MPEG LA patent pool. Revenue from the patent pool allowed Anastassiou to pursue interdisciplinary research in other areas. The project aims to investigate genetic variations based on genome-wide association data for psychiatric disorders to elucidate genetic mechanisms behind schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge In 2013, a team led by Anastassiou won the Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge (BCC), run by Sage Bionetworks and Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods (DREAM), which challenged teams to develop models to predict breast cancer survival rates based on a large gene expression and clinical feature dataset. Anastassiou's team won the challenge despite being smaller and despite competing against teams from companies such as IBM, by taking an approach that was "out-of-the-box" and "completely novel". The model predicts with 76 percent accuracy which of two breast cancer patients will live longer, which is far better than any models previously available.

Of the results, Anastassiou said:

These signatures manifest themselves in specific genes that are turned on together in the tissues of some patients in many different cancer types... If these general cancer signatures are useful in breast cancer, as we proved in this challenge, then why not in other types of cancer as well? I think that the most significant -- and exciting -- implication of our work is the hope that these signatures can be used for improved diagnostic, prognostic, and eventually, therapeutic products, applicable to multiple cancers. While the results are not yet ready for clinical use,

The research for the competition was partially funded by Anastassiou's patents in DVD encoding.