BME News Highlights
Department HighlightsJuly 23, 2008 Grant to bring JHU's most powerful computer to ICMThe Institute for Computational Medicine, based at the Homewood campus, will receive one of the 20 High-End Instrumentation Grants for 2008 awarded by the National Center for Research Resources, a part of the National Institutes of Health. The $2 million grant, the largest awarded by NCCR this year, will allow Johns Hopkins researchers to purchase a powerful computer that will speed up their efforts to find new ways to diagnose and treat brain disease, heart illnesses, cancer and other medical ailments.
Launched in 2005 as one of the first, largest and most ambitious research centers of its kind, the Institute for Computational Medicine focuses on unraveling health problems through methods other than traditional "wet-lab" techniques such as growing cells in a dish. Some of its researchers, for instance, create elaborate computer models that mimic in virtual reality the real-world activity of living cells and organs. Researchers conduct experiments with these models, testing, for example, the effects of experimental medications. Other researchers use information technology to compare digital images of healthy and diseased tissue, looking for early indications of illness.
The technological resource will be shared by more than a dozen faculty members affiliated with the Institute for Computational Medicine. ICM director Raimond Winslow predicts that it will also serve perhaps 100 other collaborators from the university's School of Medicine and Whiting School of Engineering and from other institutions.
Three Department of Biomedical Engineering faculty members who will be among the institute members using the computer to enhance their research are:
- Natalia Trayanova, who studies how dangerous arrhythmias are initiated and maintained in the heart. The computer is expected to speed up her efforts to find the best ways to halt these irregular heart rhythms with shocks from a defibrillator.
- Michael I. Miller, who compares the shape of brain structures in images from healthy and diseased patients, looking for differences that may lead to better diagnoses and treatments. Miller now uses linked computers across the country to collect the resources to conduct this research. When Miller gets access to the new Johns Hopkins computer, Winslow said, work that now takes months to accomplish by cross-country connections should take only days to complete.
- Rachel Karchin, who is using computer models to predict how mutations in proteins can trigger the development of breast cancer. The new device should enable her to study this process in more complex and more detailed models, Winslow said.
Read the complete JHU Gazette article: http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2008/21jul08/21million.html
ICM website: http://www.icm.jhu.edu Posted: July 23, 2008
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