- S. Fahlman. 1994. Roundtable discussion: supercomputing support for advanced biomedical imaging. Abstract: Biomedical imaging takes many forms. The familiar Xrays and CAT scans arc now being joined by such technologies as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and advanced forms of light microscopy that can observe living cells and tissues as they grow and change. These new technologies place unusual demands upon the computers that have ~come an integral part of the imaging system, and they present some exciting challenges. We want to enhance, analyze, and display the images in something approaching real-time, which requires computational power at the s u p e ~ p u t e r level and beyond. In addition to raw compuling cycles, these applications stress the acquisition and display hardware, communication channels, storage systems, operating systems (with the need for real-time response), memory capacity, and our ability to build the necessary software. Ultimately, these computing facilities must be packaged into a stand-alone instrument that can be used in a clinical or laboratory setring by people not trained in computer science. This panel will present three well-known experts in different areas of biomedical image processing.-Each will describe the nature of the problems he works on and the computational demands of this work, both present and future. Our goal will be to familiarize the audience with the challenges posed by this exciting fiekl and to identify which computational problems and approaches cut across all of these applications.
