The National Institutes of Health has awarded $2.1 million over three years to fund development of a Center for Grid-Enabled Medical Image Analysis in OSU’s College of Medicine and Public Health. The award is funded under the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative launched by the NIH in 2000 to use recent advances in computer science and technology to address problems in biology and medicine.

In addition, the National Science Foundation, through the National Middleware Initiative Program, has funded a complementary $400,000 grant to continue funding the development of Ohio State’s pioneering data grid middleware.

The NIH grant will fund the ongoing development of a center that specializes in the application of leading-edge computer techniques to solve problems in biomedical research and patient care. These “enabling” technologies include distributed and grid computing, middleware to manipulate and analyze large biomedical data sets, and high-end imaging analysis. The technologies help researchers and clinicians store, analyze, manipulate and broadly share information so they can better understand both mechanisms and diagnosis of disease.

The new NSF grant will add to a substantial existing base of grant funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the State of Ohio that funds these enabling technologies.

The NIH grant will fund creation of an infrastructure and developmental projects in a multidisciplinary center that draws on the expertise of a number of Ohio State’s specialists in imaging, computer and information science, engineering, genetics, mathematics, and cancer and cardiology research. Once in operation, the center’s members will develop and use biomedical imaging techniques and high-performance computing tools to transform massive amounts of image-based data into formats that can be used for statistical analysis and assessment.

"An increasing number of studies involve data pooled between many institutions,” said Dr. Joel Saltz, chair of biomedical informatics and principal investigator on the grants. “Data sets are invariably large and challenging to store, process and analyze. The technologies developed by the center will allow collaborators to share data and import images from other sites across the country and abroad.”

The NIH center’s goals include not just creating the methods needed to synthesize information, but also training computing, medical and engineering professionals to foster continued advancements in computational techniques related to biomedical research.

The initial center proposal emphasizes three projects, two of which specifically support research on cancer and heart disease.

1) Scientists in the Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute have designed instrumentation enabling the imaging of free radical metabolism and oxygenation in the cardiovascular system. The center’s efforts will result in methods the researchers can use to analyze images combining spectral and spatial characteristics over numerous cardiac cycles to correlate cardiac metabolism, function and structure.

2) Oncology imaging techniques in use by OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have advanced quickly to allow physicians to not only detect tumors, but to guide treatments and monitor their effects. The advances require powerful computational environments to process and analyze images.

3) Ohio State and the Ohio Supercomputer Center collaborate to develop software in the areas of high-end computing, grid computing, and biomedical image analysis and reconstruction.

The Ohio State University academic medical center includes the College of Medicine and Public Health, University Hospital, The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center-Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute, University Hospital East, OSU Harding Hospital, the Dorothy M. Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, a network of community care sites and the Richard M. Ross Heart Hospital, to be completed in 2004.