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FeedsBridging the Gap in Medical Imaging
January 17, 2008 | Mayo Clinic and IBM have expanded a 2006 collaboration with the creation of the Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) on the Mayo Clinic campus. The Center is using an image registration technology developed by Mayo and IBM that produces results 50 times faster than prior technologies. Each organization has devoted three researchers to direct investigations into medical imaging technologies, with the goal of eventually improving the quality of patient care.
"It's difficult to take good ideas and produce products out of them. There is always this intermediate step of: Does that idea pan out in practice?" said Bradley Erickson, chair of Radiology Informatics at Mayo Clinic and a neuro-radiologist.
MI3C exists to bridge that gap, to explore good ideas and ultimately make them ready for commercialization, either by IBM or by other companies interested in licensing these technologies.
In inaugurating MI3C, the partner organizations announced a number of likely research areas, all of which could have a significant impact on patient outcomes, should these research efforts come to fruition.
Take for instance image-guided tumor ablation. Present-day technology allows a physician to locate a tumor and, essentially, stab it with a needle in order to burn it or freeze it. But finding the tumor often requires some guesswork, with images providing insufficient detail to guide the doctor's efforts.
"We think that by applying computer technology we will be much more effective at eliminating tumors, while not eliminating too much of the good tissue next to the tumor," Erickson said.
Researchers also will be looking at video swallow analysis, a tool for analyzing swallowing capabilities in stroke patients, who sometime swallow food into their lungs. Today's videos allow doctors to make only a subjective call; MI3C efforts could allow for more precise diagnoses.
Other planned areas of study include maximum-resolution organ imaging, which offers more thorough diagnostic capabilities than do present technologies; and automated change detection and analysis, which allows physicians to easily compare changes from past to present images.
While the Mayo Clinic brings a clinical perspective to the table, IBM for its part is looking to MI3C as an opportunity to expand the capabilities of current technology.
"Our goal is to find the optimum hardware and software infrastructure to support these types of algorithms," said Bill Rapp, chief technology officer for IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences and IBM Distinguished Engineer.
It's not just a question of maximizing processor speeds, Rapp explained. Progress in advanced imaging requires the careful configuration of sophisticated interconnections that make it possible to transmit data at extremely high speeds.
He points to CT and MRI scanners as a typical example of the need for such advances. Thanks to increasing computing power, these diagnostic devices can produce literally thousands of images in virtually no time, yet doctors find themselves with ever less time on their hands to read those images.
"So we want to ask: Can we get computers to help us to look at those thousands of images and present that information in a more effective way?" Rapp said.
Working in the researchers' favor is the relatively recent advance of extremely fast processors, as for instance the cell processor. Developed originally by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba for use in video games, cell processors have become a powerful tool in researchers' efforts to develop improved imaging tools.
Ultimately, IBM's interest here lies in the possibility of licensing new technologies to prospective product developers. Rapp said the collaboration with a renown medical institution could bolster that effort.
"It's our approach to being more client-centric," he said. "How else are we going to know what is needed in this environment? This way we can know, because all the people we are working with here know exactly what is needed."
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