Forum Report

Virtual Meets Reality in Image-Guided Intervention

David Hawkes, MD, a research institute director and entrepreneur from London, and Polina Golland, PhD, assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, spoke at the April 8 CIMIT Forum at Simches Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Hawkes is director of the Centre of Medical Image Computing at University College London. He is also a founder of IXICO Ltd., a provider of end-to-end imaging solutions to the pharmaceutical and medical devices industries from site pre-qualification through to image analysis and reporting.

He discussed recent progress in developing motion, shape and biomechanical models to enhance image-guided intervention. He described recent progress in generating and testing models of respiratory motion for image-directed radiotherapy and focal ablation in the lung, liver and heart, and the development of biomechanical models for image-guided local excision in breast surgery.

His session was moderated by Ron Kikinis, MD, director of the Surgical Planning Laboratory of the Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and professor of radiology, Harvard Medical School; as well as co-program leader for image-guided therapy at CIMIT.

Dr. Golland presented a novel approach to computational modeling of spatial activation patterns observed through fMRI.

Moderator for her session was Ferenc Jolesz, MD, director, National Center for Image-Guided Therapy and director of the Division of MRI, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; professor of radiology, Harvard Medical School; director of the Image-Guided Therapy Program, BWH; and co-program leader, image-guided therapy, CIMIT.