Virtual medical imaging

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Ultrasound (US) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have become indispensable clinical tools for diagnosing diseases without having to open up or irradiate the body.  Still, it is often difficult for doctors to interpret the resulting images, especially when there are complex structures, tissue motion or blood flow.Computer simulations of medical imaging have played an important role in the development and optimization of US and MRI, because the truth behind a "virtual patient" is well-defined.  Unfortunately, many simulations are restricted to simple virtual patients (composed of cubes, spheres, etc.), and often different researchers will unknowingly reinvent the same simulation tools.Over the years my students and I have developed rudimentary US and MRI simulation tools, based on the same techniques we use to simulate blood flow for our research into vascular disease. In this proposal, I describe how we will now extend these to simulate medical imaging processes more efficiently and realistically.Important design criteria for us will be: (i) that these tools operate on anatomically realistic, three-dimensional virtual patients, so that conclusions drawn from them are more likely to work when applied in the clinic; and (ii) that they be made freely available to the research community through the same kind of open source software licenses that have driven the success of the Linux operating system.Making these tools widely available will allow researchers to focus on solving problems without having to be distracted by creating their own simulators first.  Ultimately, of course, these simulators will play an important role in improving the quality of medical imaging, and hence the diagnosis and treatment of patients.