PLACEBO: a computational platform for health professionals and bioengineers

In this article, we present PLACEBO, an innovative software and hardware platform, which intends to solve biomedical problems formulated in terms of partial differential equations. It can be networked with various imaging devices, such as MRI and CT and can be used for pre-operative surgical planning. It employs an effective computational environment for solving partial differential equations, which is based on neural networks. This approach, in order to exploit the parallel character of the neural networks, is implemented partly in specialized hardware hosted on a commercial PC. There are two operation levels. A user-level, targeting health professionals that need to solve a set of predefined biomedical problems, and a bioengineering level, which allows the construction of problem sets. Since ease of use is of paramount importance for these kind of platforms, a friendly graphical user-interface is being developed.