Staff and faculty

Won Hee Lee M.S.

Won Hee Lee received the B.E. and M.S. degrees in biomedical engineering from Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea, in 2006 and 2008, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D degree in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, and is a research assistant in the Division of Brain Stimulation and Therapeutic Modulation in the Columbia Psychiatry Department. His primary research interests include neuroimaging, neural engineering, and brain stimulation.

During his undergraduate studies in the biomedical engineering program, he started working on research projects in the Functional and Metabolic Imaging Research Center (fMIC), an Engineering Research Center in Republic of Korea where he harbored particular research interests in the fields of biomedical imaging and neural engineering. In his studies toward a master's degree, he worked on the human head modeling with finite elements (FEs) using the information in MRI and diffusion tensor MRI (DT-MRI) for bioelectromagnetic problems such as E/MEG source imaging and brain stimulation. He developed fully automatic adaptive mesh generation techniques that generate more accurate high-resolution FE head models according to the anatomical features in MRI and tissue anisotropic properties in DT-MRI. His projects also involved extracting and localizing the alpha activity of the brain in EEG and functional MRI (fMRI) using constrained independent component analysis (cICA). Upon his graduation with the highest honors, he was appointed as a research fellow in fMIC where he applied the high-resolution FE head modeling techniques to investigate the influence of tissue anisotropy conductivity on the EEG forward and inverse solutions and to perform realistic computer simulations of human brain stimulation, including transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and deep brain stimulation (DBS). In 2008, he joined the Biomedical Functional Imaging and Neuroengineering Lab at the University of Minnesota where he studied the influence of white matter anisotropic conductivity tensors on the EEG source localization through EEG and fMRI experiments. This work was the first experimental attempt in an in vivo human brain to assess the effects of white matter conductivity anisotropy on EEG source analysis.

Mr. Lee is a student member in the IEEE society, Korean society of medical biological engineering and Korean human computer interface society. He is the recipient of the travel stipend award from International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) and NIH/NIBIB travel grant award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). He received the best thesis award and outstanding research scholarship from Kyung Hee University.

BOOK CHAPTERS:

• Kim TS and Lee WH. 3-D MRI and DT-MRI content-adaptive finite element head model generation for bioelectromagnetic imaging. Recent Advanced in Biomedical Engineering. In-Tech Education and Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-953-7619-X-X, Vienna, Austria (in press).

JOURNAL ARTICLES:

• Lee WH, Liu Z, Mueller, BA, Lim K, He, B. Influence of white matter anisotropic conductivity on EEG source localization: comparison to fMRI in human primary visual cortex. Clinical Neurophysiology 2009 (in press).
• Ahn SH, Rasheed, T, Lee WH, Kim TS, Cho MH, Lee SY. Constrained independent component analysis based extraction and mapping of the brain alpha activity in EEG. Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research Res 2008;26:405-413.
• Lee WH, Seo HS, Kim TS, Lee SY. Numerical quality of the scalp electrical potentials from 3-D MRI content-adaptive finite element models of the whole head. International Journal of Bioelectromagnetism 2007;9:75-76.
• Lee WH, Kim TS, Cho MH, Lee SY. Numerical evaluations of the effect of feature maps on content-adaptive finite element mesh generation. Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research 2007;28:8-16.
• Lee WH, Kim TS, Cho MH, Ahn YB, Lee SY. Methods and evaluations of MRI content-adaptive finite element mesh generation for bioelectromagnetic problems. Physics in Medicine and Biology 2006;51:6176-6186
• Lee WH, Kim TS, Cho MH, Lee SY. MRI content-adaptive finite element mesh generation toolbox. Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research 2006;27:110-116.

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS:

• Suh HS, Lee WH, Kim SH, Kim JH, Kim TS. Effect of anisotropic electrical conductivity on transcranial direct current stimulation: high-resolution finite element analysis. Proc Int Func Elec Stim Soc, Seoul, Republic of Korea, Sep, 2009.
• Lee WH, Liu Z, Mueller BA, Lim K, He B. Influence of white matter anisotropy on EEG source localization: an experimental study. Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Conf, Minneapolis, USA, Sep, 2009.
• Suh HS, Kim SH, Lee WH, Kim TS. Realistic simulation of transcranial direct current stimulation via 3-D high-resolution finite element analysis: effect of tissue anisotropy. Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Conf, Minneapolis, USA, Sep, 2009.
• Lee WH, Seo HS, Kim SH, Cho MH, Lee SY, Kim TS. Influence of white matter anisotropy on the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation: a finite element analysis. Proc Int Conf Biomed Eng, Singapore, Dec, 2008.
• Lee WH, Kim TS, Kim AT, Lee SY. 3-D diffusion tensor MRI anisotropy content-adaptive finite element head model generation for bioelectromagnetic Imaging. Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Conf, Vancouver, Canada, Aug, 2008.