Forthcoming

Abstract Forthcoming

Abstract Forthcoming

The Imaging Technology Group runs two educational outreach projects, Bugscope and Virtual Microscope. Both provide free Web access to interactive microscopy on instruments ordinarily unavailable to grade-school students and small colleges. Bugscope allows educators to reserve 1-2 hours of time on a research-grade scanning electron microscope; they are able to investigate their own insect samples and converse with scientists in real time with just a web browser. The Virtual Microscope software mimics a microscope's controls and enables users to explore specimens on-demand by loading massive pre-collected data-sets from a collection of 90 specimens. This presentation will briefly cover lessons learned over the more than 10 continuous years Bugscope has been active. It will focus on the current state of the Bugscope project and recent collaboration with the London Natural History Museum to expand upon and contribute to the Virtual Microscope project.

Transcatheter and percutaneous liver-directed approaches are widely used for the treatment of liver tumors. These therapies include transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE), radioembolization, and percutaneous ablation. Intra-procedural imaging guidance may be critical to optimize outcomes. During the talk I will describe our recent pre-clinical and translational work focused upon the development and validation of new magnetic resonance imaging methods for intra-procedural monitoring of tumor perfusion changes during TACE, depiction of intra-hepatic radioembolization microsphere delivery, and monitoring tissue ablation zones during percutaneous irreversible electroporation procedures.

The two year old core facilities at the Institute for Genomic Biology host a selection of state of the art optical microscopes, Bioanalytical instrumentation, Plant growth chambers and a micro-fabrication facility. In addition to instrumentation the microscopy facility provides sample preparation tools and services. Trained researchers from across campus are provided with 24/7 access to the instruments. This talk will provide an over view of the instrumentation, capabilities, projects and outreach activities taking place in the IGB core facilities.

Glen Fried's forum "Core Facilities at the Institute for Genomic Biology" is canceled for today and has been rescheduled for next Tuesday, Nov 3.

State-of-the-art graphics processing units (GPUs) contain hundreds of processing units and are able to perform trillions of floating point arithmetic operations per second. The newly available computational power brought by GPUs is enabling a new generation of scientific and engineering applications to perform calculations on desk-side "personal supercomputers" that previously required HPC clusters, or that were otherwise impractical in everyday use. This talk will present recent successes in multi-GPU acceleration in VMD, a molecular dynamics visualization and analysis application in which GPU computing techniques have provided speedups ranging from 10 to over 100 times faster than commodity CPU cores. The talk will describe key challenges and algorithmic strategies involved in achieving high computational performance on GPUs, and will also include some examples of how these performance increases ultimately enable better science.

The ultrasonic backscatter coefficient (BSC) is the fundamental quantitative estimate from measurements that can be parameterized to yield the effective scatterer diameter and effective acoustic concentration. The ability to accurately estimate the BSC using different imaging systems (i.e., a system independent estimate) is significant for clinical application of quantitative ultrasound (QUS) imaging. For a number of years, the Bioacoustics Research Laboratory has been pursuing various approaches to identify ultrasonic scattering sources in solid tumors with each approach examining different scales with the overall goal being directed at classifying solid tumors. Initial work focused on inter-laboratory comparisons (with our Wisconsin BRP partner) using physical phantoms for which excellent agreement was obtained. Currently the work has a number of activities including (1) biological phantoms of known CHO cells, (2) computational phantoms constructed from actual tumor tissues and (3) spontaneous rat fibroadenomas. An inter-laboratory comparison of BSC values of rat fibroadenomas included 3 clinical ultrasound systems and a basic science laboratory system for which good agreement was obtained. Each of these approaches will be discussed. (Work supported by NIH Grant R01CA111289, a BRP with the University of Wisconsin.)

Beckman Symposium - No Forum