Brady is an authority in the field of image analysis, initially working on shape analysis while at MIT, then on robotics, but most of all with an emphasis on medical image analysis. At MIT he worked on: the multiscale representation of the bounding contours of shapes, with Haruo Asada ; two dimensional shapes, with Jon Connell; and the application of differential geometry to three-dimensional data, with Jean Ponce and Demetri Terzopoulos. He also worked on texture with Alan Yuille. He also worked with John M. Hollerbach, Tomàs Lozano-Pérez, and Matt Mason on robotics, who together published an early influential collection of articles and founded a seminal series of conferences. Arriving in Oxford in 1985, he established the Robotics Laboratory and recruited Andrew Blake, Andrew Zisserman, Stephen Cameron, Hugh Durrant-Whyte, Lionel Tarassenko, Alison Noble, David Murray. His initial focus was on mobile robotics, where he worked closely with Huosheng Hu Jan Grothusen, Stephen Smith, Mark Jenkinson, and Ian Reid. This was a collaboration with GEC Electrical Products and led in 1991 to the formation of Guidance Navigation Systems Ltd. The primary interest of this work was sensor data fusion and the real-time detection of obstacles in a robot vehicle’s planned path, leading to a “slalom” manoeuvre to avoid it, or, if this was judged infeasible by the robot, a complete re-planning of the path to the goal. Finishing a spell as Head of Engineering Science, Brady was awarded an EPSRC Senior Fellowship, during which he spent two year-long periods in the INRIA Laboratory headed by Nicholas Ayache. Brady had begun to switch from robotics to medical imaging, specifically breast cancer, in 1989, following the death of his mother-in-law Dr. Irene Friedlander from the disease. For the past 29 years he has worked with Ralph Highnam, first supervising Ralph’s thesis, then co-authoring a monograph Mammographic Image Analysis, then co-founding Mirada Solutions Ltd and subsequently Volpara Health Technologies. Together, they developed an influential mathematical model of the fluence of X-rays through the female breast as a basis for analysis of mammographic images. This work was done in collaboration with Ralph Highnam and pioneered an entirely novel “physics-based” approach. This attracted the interest of Nico Karssemeijer and led to further collaborations and the company ScreenPoint bv co-founded by Mike and Nico. Brady’s work in image analysis, specifically medical image analysis, has been wide ranging and he has contributed algorithms for image segmentation, image registration and feature detection. With Timor Kadir and Andrew Zisserman he introduced the influential Kadir–Brady saliency detector at the European Conference on Computer Vision in 2004. During his research career, Brady has supervised 115 students including Alison Noble, David Forsyth, and Demetri Terzopoulos Philip Agre, Wenjia Bai, Margaret Fleck, Ralph Highnam Huosheng Hu, Faraz Janan, Kieran Smallbone, Stephen Smith and Mark Woolrich Outside of academia, Brady has been involved with numerous start-up companies in the field of medical imaging including Matakina and ScreenPoint, Mirada Medical and Perspectum Diagnostics.
