Progress in high performance medical imaging

Medical imaging has made great technological breakthroughs in multimodal acquisition, visualization, and analysis with many complementary image modalities to non-invasively capture human anatomy, physiology and pathology. New functional imaging techniques help elucidate the dynamics of human health and disease at much higher throughput, enabled by growth in affordable computing power, memory capacity, processor speed, and communication bandwidth. Recently, exceedingly powerful computer hardware and optimized image processing software may, for the first time, allow high volume image data processing and manipulation (like multimodal registration) to become clinically feasible on a routine basis in real-time. In reviewing recent medical imaging advances, we discuss some major open issues and directions.