Final Activity Report Summary - MAMIP (Mathematical Methods in Medical Image Processing)
We have developed new mathematical methods for medical imaging in this project. To focus our efforts, we have defined a set of key problems in brain research including schizophrenia as the initial Driving biological problems (DBPs) for our work at the Technion. Schizophrenia is a multi-faceted illness affecting 1 % of population in Western Europe and consuming a significant portion of the healthcare budget; yet the science of schizophrenia is only now beginning to take concrete form, primarily because neuroimaging techniques are just now providing a detailed picture of the structure of living brains and tracking the way those brains function in controlled experimental settings.
These sophisticated images - time varying, multi-spectral, scalar and vector-valued - are fruitful ground for computing because the patient's anatomy forms a three dimensional coordinate system in which to accurately register and combine the multiple sources of information. In addition to making important contributions to the understanding of schizophrenia as an illness, we believe that the richness of the schizophrenia problem domain has driven the creation of computational tools and techniques with broad and significant applicability to many important areas of image-based biomedical computing both within the brain and in other organs.
These sophisticated images - time varying, multi-spectral, scalar and vector-valued - are fruitful ground for computing because the patient's anatomy forms a three dimensional coordinate system in which to accurately register and combine the multiple sources of information. In addition to making important contributions to the understanding of schizophrenia as an illness, we believe that the richness of the schizophrenia problem domain has driven the creation of computational tools and techniques with broad and significant applicability to many important areas of image-based biomedical computing both within the brain and in other organs.