3-D Medical Imaging Reaches the Stars (Forwarded)

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Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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For Release: Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Release No.: 2007-07

3-D Medical Imaging Reaches the Stars

Cambridge, MA -- A unique collaboration created by Harvard's Initiative
for Innovative Computing (IIC) has brought together astronomers, medical
imaging specialists, and software engineers to adapt medical imaging
software to create 3-D views of astronomical bodies.

"Once this technology is fully developed, we will be able to explore and
visualize space in entirely new ways," said Alyssa Goodman, Director of
the IIC and a Professor of Astronomy in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and
Sciences.

Goodman discussed results from the IIC's Astronomical Medicine Project, or
AstroMed, last week at the IIC's Inaugural Symposium in Cambridge, Mass.

AstroMed typifies the work of the IIC, bringing together computer
scientists and their colleagues in other disciplines to develop new
approaches to scientific problem-solving -- in this case, solving problems
common to both astronomy and medicine, particularly the visualization and
analysis of large, complex data sets.

In pursuit of that goal, AstroMed researchers are working to modify
existing medical imaging programs for use in astronomical research. The
revised programs can generate 3-D views of cosmic structures, just as
physicians generate 3-D views of anatomical structures.

Astronomical and medical research are more alike than they might seem.
Astronomers and medical researchers often rely on quantitative analysis of
imaging data for insight. Astronomers may be looking for nuggets of
star-forming material buried in interstellar matter while doctors are
looking for tumors hidden inside a brain, but the steps in their
investigations are extraordinarily similar.

Until recently, researchers would have needed a powerful supercomputer to
create 3-D visualizations like those of AstroMed. Now, such visualizations
can be done on a laptop with Open Source programs such as "3D Slicer" and
"OsiriX."

3D Slicer allows users to interact with data. Not only can a 3-D object be
created -- it can be rotated, zoomed and cropped using a set of intuitive
tools. In astronomy, "3-D" doesn't always mean three spatial dimensions.
By combining the 2-D position of gas emission mapped out on the sky with
1-D measurements of the gas's velocity along the line of sight,
astronomers generate 3-D data sets with dimensions that can serve as
proxies for three spatial dimensions. Using programs like 3D Slicer and
OsiriX on these virtual 3-D constructions, astronomers can become virtual
spacefarers, easily selecting "distances" and viewing angles in order to
navigate around a gas cloud and study it from "all sides."

"Right now, this software is a tool for scientists. We are blazing a trail
in the field of 3-D astronomical computer graphics," explained Michael
Halle, AstroMed Project Manager. "As we refine our capabilities, we hope
to develop a tool that researchers in a variety of fields reliant on 3-D
data will use on everyday computers."

Initially, the AstroMed team has focused on studying dusty gas clouds in
the Milky Way that are forming new stars. The team is working to analyze
data from the COMPLETE survey of star-forming regions, which has collected
extensive infrared and radio measurements of several star-forming
complexes. Already, their work on the Perseus region has identified
several previously unknown large bubbles and shells of gas, as well as
more than a dozen new jets of material shooting from newborn stars.

Goodman added that while medical advances currently are helping the
astronomical community, in the future, astronomers' innovations in
extending and improving this software will help the medical community.
"The algorithms that we develop to identify star-forming clumps in a dusty
gas cloud might be used to identify possible tumors in a person's body,"
she explained.

The revised software also may prove useful to other data-intensive
branches of science like weather modeling and geophysics.

The software and techniques developed by the IIC will contribute to the
revolutionary astronomy project known as the Virtual Observatory. The
Virtual Observatory will link all the world's astronomy data together,
giving people around the world easy access to data from many different
telescopes and observatories, at all wavelengths of the electromagnetic
spectrum.

More information about AstroMed is available online at
http://astromed.iic.harvard.edu

The team at Harvard includes: astronomer Goodman, Dr. Michael Halle, a
principal at the Surgical Planning Laboratory of Brigham and Women's
Hospital and the AstroMed Project Manager at IIC; Dr. Jens Kauffman, a
postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and
IIC; Michelle Borkin, Harvard College '06, now an IIC Research Associate;
and Douglas Alan, an IIC Senior Software Engineer. In addition, the team
is working with Dr. Nick Holliman of the University of Durham's
Visualization Laboratory in the U.K. on enhancing AstroMed images using
stereoscopic (3-D) displays.

The Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) accelerates the pace of
science by fostering collaborations that span traditional academic
boundaries, bringing together computer scientist and scientists in other
disciplines to develop solutions to problems and develop ideas and
inventions along the continuum from basic science to scientific
computation to computational science to computer science.

Note to editors: Images to accompany this release are online at
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/200...07_images.html