Distributed Thinking

One of the best talks at AHM2007 was on medical imaging, by Prof. Anders Ynnerman of Linkoping University in Sweden. Imaging researchers always have an advantage when giving talks because they can show much of their work in pictures; Anders took full advantage. The immediacy of visualisation in communicating information meant that some viewers found his medical pictures a little too gruesome. The computer science aspect of his talk was about techniques for 3-D reconstruction of body images from the 2-D “slices” taken by medical CAT and MRI scanners. As these scanning devices increase in resolution, so the size of data to be processed increases. In order to process the data, ZZX is using intelligent compression techniques, based on whether a voxel represents bone, blood or tissue. Aside from the technical content, I was very interested in the uses XXX has found for this work in addition to the usual pre-operative medical briefing. His team are now able to help the police by perfo