Apple Science Profiles

This Apple Science podcast features Claire Nouvian, a French journalist who became fascinated with the deep-sea after seeing a museum exhibit in 2001. She wanted to see and learn more, but soon discovered how few materials were available. This motivated her to collect the countless photos she knew must be scattered in the computers of deep-sea scientists around the globe. Nouvian amassed over 6,000 photos of deep-sea creatures that required navigation and manipulation. Nouvian appreciates the simplicity of the Mac operating system. To process her photo library, she needed only a PowerBook and a collection of external hard drives. To review photos, she used Apple Preview, and to manipulate photographs she turned to Adobe Photoshop. Her publisher connected her with graphic designer Anne-Marie Bourgeois, who works exclusively with Macs:three Power Macs and two PowerBooks. The two easily exchanged files as they produced the book. Nouvian sent photo files and Bourgeois laid them out in book format using Quark XPress, then converted them to PDF files for Nouvian's review. The countless photos that were collected were compiled into a book, The Deep, which has just been released.

This Apple Science podcast features CEO Brian Shelton and Director of Technology Joseph Canady of PathCon Laboratories. From two 100% Mac computer based facilities, researchers fight against pathogenic menaces such as MRSA, Legionella, Anthrax, and virulent new strains of influenza. Their Mac-based workflow includes multiple MacBook Pros, Mac Pros, iMacs and Xserve servers. Proprietary software provides PathCon’s team of top scientists the tools to identify and prevent the spread of dangerous pathogens. With screening, analysis, and custom designed software, they detect and intercept these and other microbiological adversaries before they become a threat.

This Apple Science podcast features Dr. Fernando Cucchietti, scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who credits his presentation skills in giving him an advantage when applying for grants—and even in helping him get his job. Cucchietti uses a combination of tools to build graphics for his presentations, ultimately importing and organizing his files in Keynote, part of Apple’s iWork ’08 suite of productivity applications. Dr. Cucchietti noticed that the system never crashed. He started doing short simulations on it and found he never had to reboot. Before switching to Apple technology, he used Linux. His favorite open-source applications and programs were written to work with any flavor of UNIX. In the event that he or his colleagues ever want to use Linux-specific applications or do any Linux development, it’s easy to install and run Linux on a Mac.

This Apple Science podcast features Professor Tom Lewellen in the Department of Radiology’s Nuclear Medicine Division at the University of Washington. He and his team are designing Mac-based imaging systems that give investigators a closer look at metabolic functions in a mouse that weighs about an ounce. The primary design goal of these pre-clinical research tools is higher resolution images. The ultimate goals are better understanding of disease, more effective therapy, and better outcomes from patient care. The Physics Group is tasked with providing the Department of Radiology with superior imaging tools. The technology used in their development workflow includes 15 MacBook Pro and six iMac systems to design circuit boards, write code, and simulate scanner systems under development. They run simulations on an eight-core Apple Xserve cluster with seven terabytes of RAID storage. An 8-core Mac Pro with two Apple Cinema Displays is used exclusively for viewing scanner images with OsiriX, an open-source, Mac-only, DICOM viewer. No technology out there could give them the kind of resolution they need. So they use the Mac to design, build and run positron emission tomography – or PET - scanners that push the resolution envelope. Off-the-shelf hardware components couldn’t provide the performance they need, so they started from scratch, using the Mac to design hardware and write code. Asked why we they like the Mac better, their answer is that it’s easier to use.

This Apple Science podcast features MIT’s Deb Roy, whose Human Speechome Project at the MIT Media Lab is exploring how children learn language. In its observation phase, the project will archive 200,000 hours of audio and video recordings, nearly a petabyte of data. Macintosh Xserves and Xserve RAIDs, interfaced with other computing platforms, collect, process, and store the vast dataset. TotalRecall, a Mac OS X-based application being developed at MIT, is the central tool for navigating and making sense of it all. With his research team at the MIT Media Lab, computing tools from Apple, and offering himself and his family as test subjects, Roy is developing that technology.

This Apple Science podcast features Michael Broome, DVM, a principal at Advanced Veterinary Medical Imaging in Tustin, California. He was unhappy with the hardware and software costs of commercially available image viewing systems. He wanted a Picture Archive Communication System that would enable him to share DICOM images on high-quality viewing stations across his network; reduce the costs of viewing; and provide a reliable, no-downtime central archive. The practice used Apple technology to implement a Mac-Based SecureVault PACS solution running on an Apple Xserve RAID. DICOM images are archived in SecureVault and viewed in OsiriX on iMac and Power Mac systems across the AVMI network. The combination of the Mac and OsiriX gives AVMI a powerful, efficient solution at a very attractive cost.

This podcast features Professor Martin Elliott, who practices cardiothoracic surgery on children at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. His team needed to capture videos of challenging surgical procedures so to share with other professionals and students. He had been recording them on tape, but wanted to record them directly as digital files. He also needed to enable the team’s surgeons to edit the raw video into labeled, professional-quality clips. Finally, he needed powerful tools for processing and viewing CT and MRI images for planning surgeries. Dr. Elliott and his team now use OsiriX, a powerful Mac-based medical image viewer, to process radiological files into 3D images for surgical planning. He and his colleagues use iMac, MacBook and Mac Pro systems to capture videos of surgical procedures, storing them on an Apple Xserve. Surgeons bring up video on their Mac and use Final Cut Studio for editing and color correction, adding motion graphics and text to make their projects suitable for sharing with families and with other professionals. With Apple technology it is now possible to document complex procedures that correct congenital heart defects so surgical centers around the world can benefit from their research, discoveries and techniques.

This Apple Science podcast features Dr. Gary Spiegel, Co-Medical Director of the Hartford Hospital Stroke Center, where Apple technology was implemented to reduce costs and to enable more innovative ways of addressing critical stroke care. Dr. Spiegel needed a reliable way to archive the big images produced in the angiography suite. The hospital’s picture archive communication system (PACS) could not store or retrieve Spiegel’s image files, often as large as 700MB. Dr. Roger Katen designed an Apple-based archiving system using OsiriX, an open source medical image management software system. He installed identical systems, each including a quad-core Mac Pro, an Xserve RAID, and a 30-inch Apple Cinema Display, in the angiography suite and in Spiegel’s nearby office. The two systems, linked by a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection, provide data redundancy. Spiegel’s wish list for a solution included reliability, performance, and reasonable cost. The system now handles the largest files with ease.

This Apple in science podcast features the “Picturing to Learn” program. The event was held at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, the third in a series of regional workshops growing out of an innovative project launched in 2001 by Felice Frankel, then a science photographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Frankel brought leading scientists from a wide range of disciplines together at MIT with graphic designers, writers, animators, critics, cognitive psychologists and others for the groundbreaking Image and Meaning Conference. The conference started as an experiment in developing visual thinking and communication skills. Participants from diverse fields of science, graphic arts, communication, technology and mathematics came to search for better ways to use visual representations to communicate scientific concepts and data. Individuals emerged with a remarkably unified sense of purpose, and a goal: to continue building an interdisciplinary community of visual practice and solution-sharing that would develop improved techniques for representing science for research, education and communication. They compared visual expressions of research across many fields, and discovered that a single scientific concept or phenomenon can often be expressed in remarkably divergent ways. They were surprised to find that multiple fields share the many challenges in visual representation. The conference explored the power of visual media, from simple drawings to rich animations and interactive online graphics, in helping the public understand science. As computers pump vast quantities of data into fast-growing fields like genomics, visualization tools that can handle massive datasets with ease of use and fast results are becoming increasingly important for data exploration and discovery.

This Apple science podcast features physicist Dr. Brian Cox of the University of Manchester. He works as a particle physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where the world’s biggest Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will attempt to recreate the Big Bang in miniature. Cox has gained a following for his presentation skills and ability to communicate complex ideas surrounding particle science concepts to lay-audiences. CERN’s team of more than 10,000 scientists, most with a UNIX background, found the Mac Book Pro running Mac OS X solved the problem of two or more machines while allowing them to run legacy Fortran particle science programs and productivity applications. For transporting his equipment and knowledge base from the research lab to the presentation stage, Cox relies on his MacBook Air. Apple’s ability to sync and support multiple platforms plays a crucial part in the biggest scientific research experiment ever attempted.