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National Center for Image Guided Therapy

National Alliance-Medical Imaging Computing (NAMIC) U54-EB005149

The National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing (NAMIC) is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, software engineers, and medical investigators who develop computational tools for the analysis and visualization of medical image data. The purpose of the center is to provide the infrastructure and environment for the development of computational algorithms and open source technologies and to oversee training and dissemination of these tools to the medical research community. This world-class software and development environment serves as a foundation for accelerating the development and deployment of computational tools that are readily accessible to the medical research community.

The team combines cutting-edge computer vision research (to create medical imaging analysis algorithms) with state-of-the-art software engineering techniques (based on "extreme" programming techniques in a distributed, open-source environment) to enable computational examination of both basic neuroscience and neurological disorders. Driving biological projects will come initially from the study of schizophrenia, but the methods will be applicable to many other diseases. Therefore, computational tools and open systems technologies and platforms developed by NAMIC will initially be used to study anatomical structures and connectivity patterns in the brain, derangements of which have long been thought to play a role in the etiology of schizophrenia.

Publications

  • O'Donnell L, Westin CF, Golby AJ. Tract-Based Morphometry. Int Conf Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2007;10(Pt 2):161-168. PMID: 18044565.
  • DiMaio SP, Kapur T, Cleary K, Aylward S, Kazanzides P, Vosburgh K, Ellis R, Duncan J, Farahani K, Lemke H, Peters T, Lorensen W, Gobbi D, Haller J, Clarke L, Pizer S, Taylor R, Galloway Jr R, Fichtinger G, Hata N, Lawson K, Tempany C, Kikinis R, Jolesz F. Challenges in image-guided therapy system design. NeuroImage 2007; 37(Suppl 1):S144-S151. PMID: 17644360.