The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
February 17, 2009
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Feb. 17 -- In the blink of an eye, people at risk of becoming blind can now be screened for eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration.
Using a technology originally developed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to understand semiconductor defects, three locations in Memphis have been equipped with digital cameras that take pictures of the retina. Those images are relayed to a center where they are analyzed and the patient knows in minutes whether he or she needs additional medical attention.
"Once we've taken pictures of the eyes, we transmit that information to our database, where it is compared to thousands of images of known retinal disease states," said Ken Tobin, who led the ORNL team that developed the technology. "From there, the computer system is able to determine whether the patient passes the screening or it provides a follow-up plan that includes seeing an ophthalmologist."
In coming weeks, cameras will be installed at four rural and urban health care centers serving the Mississippi Delta, and another camera is planned for a federally funded health center in Chattanooga. Eventually, the goal is to have hundreds of cameras throughout the United States and beyond. If disease can be detected early, treatments can preserve vision and significantly reduce the occurrence of debilitating blindness.
This project takes advantage of ORNL's proprietary content-based image retrieval technology, which quickly sorts through large databases and finds visually similar images. For more than a decade manufacturers of semiconductors have used this technology to rapidly scan hundreds of thousands of tiny semiconductors to learn quickly about problems in the manufacturing process.
"Our approach allows us to adapt a proven technology to describe key regions of the retina, and this information can then be used to index images in a content-based image retrieval library," Tobin said. "What separates this from other methods is that we have automated the process of diagnosing retinal disease by capturing the expert knowledge of an ophthalmologist in a patient archive.
Leading the medical portion of the project is Edward Chaum, an ophthalmologist and Plough Foundation professor of retinal diseases at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (http://www.eye.utmem.edu) Hamilton Eye Institute in Memphis. Chaum, the lead researcher on the National Eye Institutes grant that has funded much of this research, is especially excited about the number of people, particularly the indigent and underserved communities, that this technology will help.
"Right now, with 21 million diabetics in the United States, we need to be screening 400,000 patients for diabetic eye disease every week," Chaum said. "Less than half of these diabetics receive the recommended annual eye exam, which is absolutely essential to minimize serious eye complications and potential blindness."
By 2050 the number of diabetics in the United States is expected to double, so the task of screening patients becomes even more daunting. Looking beyond the United States and more near term, the World Health Organization estimates that by 2025 more than 1 million patients will need to be screened worldwide for diabetes every day.
"To reach this goal, we are going to have to change the health care delivery paradigm," Chaum said, "and that will mean distributing these cameras to clinics and offices of primary care physicians."
Page: 1 of 2(Digg, Technorati, more)
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager integrates all the cluster productivity tools you need to deploy, run and manage your HPC environment.
The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...
The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...
For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...
Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...
Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...
Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...
Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...
Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...
Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.
Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.
Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.
Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.
LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html