Information technology in biomedical functional imaging

In parallel with rapid advances in computer technology, biomedical functional imaging is impacting to an ever increasing extent on healthcare. Functional imaging allows us to see dynamic processes quantitatively in the living human body. However, as we need to deal with 4 dimensional time varying images, space requirements and computational complexity are extremely high. This makes information management and communication difficult. Using the minimum amount of data to represent the required information, developing fast algorithms to process the data, organizing the data in such a way to facilitate information management, and extracting the maximum amount of useful information from the recorded data, have become important research tasks in biomedical information technology. For the last 10 years, the Biomedical and Multimedia Information Technology (EMIT) Group has conducted systematic studies on these topics. Some of the results relating to functional imaging data acquisition, compression, storage, management, processing, modeling and simulation, are reported.