Apple Science Profiles

This Apple Science podcast features radiology Professor Osman Ratib of the Geneva University Hospital. Dr. Ratib wanted to give his clinician colleagues an interactive 3D look at the results of radiology exams to improve image analysis and health care management. Workstations from the scanner vendors were too few, too costly, and limited in capability. He wanted a set of sophisticated navigation tools that would run on a powerful but more cost-effective platform, so that they could be deployed in clinical offices, libraries, and tumor board reviews where physicians could readily use them. After a test installation in the Radiology Department, physicians in 15 hospital departments were given the opportunity to acquire Mac systems running OsiriX, an open-source DICOM viewer. They use 60 Mac systems, mostly high-end Mac Pro and iMac, in offices, libraries and conference rooms to review the results of radiological exams in 3D format with the easy-to-use Mac GUI. The accessibility of sophisticated visual analysis tools improves the quality of surgery planning and healthcare, helping to improve the quality of surgical planning and patient care.

This Apple Science podcast features Professors Phillip Manning and Bill Sellers of the University of Manchester and the rare find of fossilized dinosaur skin by the Marmarth Research Foundation. The University relies on Macs to create physiologically correct models of the 65 million-year-old hadrosaur and to discover clues about dinosaur movement. Applying the latest data to the locomotion model required powerful computing resources. Rather than rely on the university’s HPC cluster, they decided on a dedicated cluster that could run millions of trial simulations in parallel. The newly introduced 8-core Mac Pro allowed Sellers to install his own 60-core Mac Pro cluster. Xgrid enabled him to run simulations across multiple systems; verify the qualifications of the desktop systems he pulls in from the campus network to harvest unused processor cycles; and review results on a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display during runs. Mac computers provided not only power, but a cluster that was easy to install, maintain and scale.

The 3D visualization specialists at MAAT3D, a French association of scientists and educators, sought a way to improve the visualization of mummies, treatment of patients needing reconstructive facial surgery, and creation of medical illustrations. They also wanted to display visualizations of mummies more effectively to museum audiences. The processing power of Mac Pro Intel workstations enables MAAT3D to render 3D visualizations in VGStudio Max 2.0 in real time. The Mac platform, which costs less than competing workstations, gives the MAAT3D team a more stable operating system. They use Final Cut Pro with Motion 2 and Shake to create exciting animations of mummy visualizations, which can be shown to museum audiences in theaters or on iPods and MAAT3D will integrate into its display systems. The powerful, stable Mac computing platform provides faster rendering at reduced hardware costs.

This Apple Science podcast features Evolutionary geneticist Dr. Pardis Sabeti, an Assistant Professor at Harvard University in the Center for Systems Biology and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Sabeti sought a cost-effective and powerful UNIX-based desktop solution that would allow her lab’s researchers to access and analyze large volumes of data, both locally and remotely. With 8-core Mac Pro computers as their main workstations, researchers have important graphics capabilities and a greatly improved user interface when working in a UNIX environment. The cost-effective 8-core Mac Pro computers enable powerful computing from the desktop and easy remote interoperability with the lab’s multi-thousand-core cluster. The team can manipulate data in meaningful ways, develop new applications and perform general productivity functions—all from the same workstation.

This Apple Science podcast features Ned Gardiner and the producers at the American Museum of Natural History, who looked to Apple when they needed a next-generation environment for creating high-definition Science Bulletins. Underpinning the Science Bulletins production pipeline are 18 Mac notebooks and desktop systems, three Xserve G5 servers, and six Xserve RAID arrays – a collaborative environment that leverages a 23-terabyte Xsan network via GB Ethernet and Fibre Channel. AMNH is 100% Mac. Scientist Ned Gardiner processes images from raw satellite readings and other data on his 17-inch MacBook Pro. Animators turn 2D images into interactive 3D animations on Power Mac G5 Quad computers and collaborate with producers via the 23TB Xsan production SAN using QuickTime 7 movies accessed with VirtualVTR. The team delivers the final product in multiple formats, from 1080i HD MPEG-2 files for display in museums to QuickTime movies for the Web. Transforming scientific and satellite data into intuitive, interactive HD visualizations required a powerful, collaborative pipeline to say the least – and Mac delivered.

This Apple Science podcast features Professor Jim Brewer of UCSD and his neurology practice at the Human Memory Laboratory in La Jolla, California. Dr. Brewer sought a practical way to measure shrinkage of the hippocampus, the memory gateway to the brain, and gain objective evidence of early Alzheimer's disease as the cause of mild memory loss. Brewer’s practice became a beta site for NeuroQuant, a Mac-based image analysis system that processes MRI DICOM brain-scan images. It quantifies the volumes of all regions of the brain and provides statistical data showing hippocampus size for healthy patients of the same age. Brewer runs NeuroQuant on an iMac, along with OsiriX, an open-source DICOM viewer and PACS workstation. Existing methods required manually tracing the organ on 256 image slices from an MRI brain scan – a process that can take 100 hours. Using Apple computers, pulling a patient’s DICOM files from the hospital PACS, Brewer can quantify hippocampus size in about 8.5 minutes.

This Apple Science podcast features Assistant Professor Maki Sugimoto of Teikyo University Chiba Medical Center, a gastrointestinal surgeon who wanted a better approach to navigation for planning and performing both aggressive and minimally invasive surgeries. His specialty, hepato/biliary/pancreatic surgery, involved navigating through particularly complex anatomy. His wish list included remote control of real-time rendered volumetric images in the operating room, including images projected onto the patient. Dr. Sugimoto uses an 8-core Mac Pro Workstation or a MacBook Pro to run OsiriX, an open-source DICOM viewer that creates volumetric images from patients’ CT and MRI scans. He displays the images on a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display in the operating room and manipulates them with a wireless remote control. He also uses the Mac Pro and a projector to display the images on patients’ bodies when preparing them for laparoscopic surgery. The result: more efficient navigation, better surgical results, and better patient outcomes.