New Johns Hopkins imaging center to widen windows on...(earchers and clinicians. The new bo...),Health

The new bottleneck, Mori says, lies in not being able to quantify information from a glut of images or interpret it rapidly enough. It's the access to good image analysis that must increase.

The CTI aims to improve things, University-wide, with several approaches. First, they'll set up a "protocol core" staffed by expert advisors who'll review proposed studies and offer guidance in collecting images. They'll also refer researchers to an appropriate Hopkins imaging data acquisition site. Sites include the F.M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, the Molecular Imaging Center in the Broadway Research Building, the Department of Radiology's PET Center, Radiology's MRI Service Center and its Animal NMR Service Center.

Once high-quality images are generated, the core serves as a bridge to analysis in several ways. For one, it offers trainingboth individual and groupin the most widely used image analysis techniques. This educational arm of CTI will make computers and training available on a daily basis. "We anticipate high demand for this service," says Marilyn Albert, another of CTI's co-directors. "The interest is already there."

In addition, the CTI aims to centralize services for image analysis, particularly for projects with high-quality anatomical images. Though still in the planning stages, two image analysis stations will open, one, under Mori, in the Traylor Building on the medical campus and another, headed by CTI Co-Director Michael Miller, at Homewood's Center for Imaging Science.

At first, CTI will charge for its comprehensive analysis, but the ultimate hope is to automate the process so fully that investigators can perform it, gratis, in their own laboratories. "That ability is critical because it will free the center to create even more advanced image analysis and share it," Mori adds.

Especially helpful, the planners say, is CTI's
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