Mayo Clinic and IBM announced the creation of a collaborative research facility aimed at advancing medical imaging technologies to improve the quality of patient care.

Mayo Clinic and IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the creation of a collaborative research facility aimed at advancing medical imaging technologies to improve the quality of patient care. The Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) is an extension of a Mayo-IBM collaboration announced in 2007, the results of which have given physicians the ability to register medical images up to 50 times quicker and provide critical diagnosis, such as the growth or shrinkage of tumors, in seconds instead of hours.

Bradley Erickson, M.D., Ph.D., Mayo Clinic (seated), and Bill Rapp, IBM, Co-leaders of the joint research center

"This facility will allow us to explore projects in medical imaging and radiology that can provide faster and better information for our physicians, and in turn, improved treatments for our patients," said Bradley Erickson, M.D., Ph.D., head of Mayo's Radiology Informatics Lab. "The collaborative potential of the MI3C means we'll be able to develop computationally intensive solutions for diagnostic problems we see every day but that we at Mayo could not attempt to resolve on our own." Driving these patient-centered projects will be a full-time team comprised of both Mayo and IBM researchers and development staff. Together, they will be tackling a long list of potential projects, including:

• Maximum-resolution organ imaging to provide physical (phenotype) information that parallels the current level of genetic detail available for the same tissue. This will give physicians a much more complete impression of a patient's condition.
  
• Image-guided tumor ablation - a means to pinpoint and maximize efficiency of heat transfer probes used to destroy cancer tumors. By guiding physicians, this innovation would allow accuracy and minimize side effects.
  
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• Automated Change Detection and Analysis - this algorithm would allow physicians to compare a new image with a previous one, eliminate what has not changed and see clearly what change has occurred, improving diagnostic speed and accuracy.

At the heart of the MI3C will beat the latest in high-end imaging platforms and computational hardware, including the newest version of IBM's breakthrough computing system based on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.), the BladeCenter QS21. The MI3C will showcase this technology along with Mayo's leadership in medical imaging research and informatics.

"The MI3C is a physical manifestation of the larger set of skills and resources IBM and Mayo Clinic can collectively apply to the medical imaging space," said Bill Rapp, IBM distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for IBM's Healthcare and Life Sciences team. "IBM has world-class research and development teams focused on the fundamental algorithms that drive medical imaging informatics and hardware, while Mayo Clinic provides unmatched expertise for exploiting these algorithms in applications that support a working, accurate radiology environment."

The MI3C will be housed on the downtown Mayo campus in Rochester, Minn., and will bring together clinicians, researchers and vendors in an environment where they can freely interact. By mutual agreement, third parties also will have future opportunities to collaborate with IBM and Mayo in the facility. In addition to increasing interest and participation in imaging projects that will improve patient care, the MI3C also hopes to attract research grants for future investigations. The work will not only grow assets in bioinformatics at IBM and Mayo, but result in new graphics tools for visualization and development of a software library for medical imaging on high-end computer systems.