Regional Project

Recent advances in medical imaging provide accurate and reliable three-dimensional data, which are currently used in several applications, such as diagnosis, planning of radiation therapy, image-guided surgery, and forensic medicine. The research team will develop new methods and technologies for modelling, analysing, and visualizing three-dimensional medical data. These aims will be achieved by integrating shape analysis techniques for the extraction of morphological characteristics of pathological nature with knowledge domain for shape annotation, also considering the underlying physiological and biological processes. All these factors are of great importance and complexity in the health sector for the development of innovative ICT technologies to support the diagnosis phase. The integration of quantitative parameters extracted from multi-modality imaging techniques will allow the generation of more accurate predictive models of normal and dysfunctional behaviour of organs and tissues. This innovation will be improved by the extraction of physiological parameters, which are then used to generate more accurate virtual models of normal and disease states. The research activities of the Project will involve CNR-IMATI, Softeco Sismat Srl, and the Innovation Hub POLITECMED.

Linking 3D medical data and their underling semantics is also one of the objectives of CNR-IMATI within the EU FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network "MultiScaleHuman" (http://multiscalehuman.miralab.ch), whose main goal is to research by training a body of early stage researchers (ESR) and experienced researchers (ER) in the creation of a multi-scale biological data visualization and knowledge management system for improved understanding, diagnosis and treatment of physiological human articulation.