Information technology applications in biomedical functional imaging

In parallel with the rapid advances in computer technology, biomedical functional imaging is having an ever-increasing impact on healthcare. Functional imaging allows us to see dynamic processes quantitatively in the living human body. However, as we need to deal with four-dimensional time-varying images, space requirements and computational complexity are extremely high. This makes information management, processing and communication difficult. Using the minimum amount of data to represent the required information, developing fast algorithms to process the data, organizing the data in such a way as to facilitate information management, and extracting the maximum amount of useful information from the recorded data have become important research tasks in biomedical information technology. For the last ten years, the Biomedical and Multimedia Information Technology (EMIT) Group at Sydney University and, recently, the Center for Multimedia Signal Processing at Hong Kong Polytechnic University have conducted systematic studies on these topics. Some of the results relating to functional imaging data acquisition, compression, storage, management, processing, modeling and simulation are briefly reported in this paper.