Proceedings Article | 5 May 2004
Proc. SPIE. 5367, Medical Imaging 2004: Visualization, Image-Guided Procedures, and Display
KEYWORDS: Biology, Medical imaging, Databases, Proteins, Biomedical optics, Molecular biology, Organisms, Cancer, Image processing, Medicine
The Human Genome has been defined, giving us one part of the equation that stems from the central dogma of
molecular biology. Despite this awesome scientific achievement, the correspondence between genomics and imaging is
weak, since we cannot predict an organism's phenotype from even perfect knowledge of its genetic complement.
Biological knowledge comes in several forms, and the genome is perhaps the best known and most completely
understood type. Imaging creates another form of biological information, providing the ability to study morphology,
growth and development, metabolic processes, and diseases in vitro and in vivo at many levels of scale.
The principal challenge in biomedical imaging for the future lies in the need to reconcile the data provided by one or
multiple modalities with other forms of biological knowledge, most importantly the genome, proteome, physiome, and
other "-ome's."
To date, the imaging science community has not set a high priority on the unification of their results with genomics,
proteomics, and physiological functions in most published work. Images are relatively isolated from other forms of
biological data, impairing our ability to conceive and address many fundamental questions in research and clinical
practice.
This presentation will explain the challenge of biological knowledge integration in basic research and clinical
applications from the standpoint of imaging and image processing. The impediments to progress, isolation of the
imaging community, and mainstream of new and future biological science will be identified, so the critical and
immediate need for change can be highlighted.
