ETH Zurich and IBM improve diagnosis of os... ( With the goal of developing an accur...)

ETH Zurich and IBM improve diagnosis of osteoporosis

Date:7/2/2008

With the goal of developing an accurate, powerful and fast method to automate the analysis of bone strength, scientists of the ETH Zurich Departments of Mechanical and Process Engineering and Computer Science teamed up with supercomputing experts at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. The breakthrough method developed by the team combines density measurements with a large-scale mechanical analysis of the inner-bone microstructure.

Using large-scale, massively parallel simulations, the researchers were able to obtain a dynamic "heat map" of strain, which changes with the load applied to the bone. This map shows the clinician exactly where and under what load a bone is likely to fracture. "With that knowledge, a clinician can also detect osteoporotic damage more precisely and, by adjusting a surgical plate appropriately, can best determine the location of the damage," explains Dr. Costas Bekas of IBM's Computational Sciences team in Zurich. "This work is an excellent showcase of the dramatic potential that supercomputers can have for our everyday lives."

The joint team utilized the massively large-scale capabilities of the 8-rack Blue Gene /L supercomputer to conduct the first simulations on a 5 by 5 mm specimen of real bone. Within 20 minutes, the supercomputer simulation generated 90 Gigabytes of output data. "It is this combination of increased speed and size that will allow solving clinically relevant cases in acceptable time and unprecedented detail", says Professor Ralph Mller, Director of the ETH Zurich Institute for Biomechanics.

Going beyond static bone strength

Ten years ago, the world's most sophisticated supercomputer, called Deep Blue, would not have been able to handle the sheer size of the calculations. Even with sufficient system memory, it would have taken roughly a week of computing time - too long for meaningful impact on diagnosis and treatment.

"Ten years from now, today's supercomputers' p
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Contact: Professor Ralph Muller
ram@ethz.ch
41-446-324-592
ETH Zurich/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Source:Eurekalert

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ETH Zurich and IBM improve diagnosis of os...( With the goal of developing an accur...)