Biomedical Imaging in the New Millennium

King C.P. Li, M.D., MBA

Associate Director, Radiology and Imaging Sciences Program

For the past century, radiologic-pathologic correlation has been the backbone of medical imaging.  By correlating medical images to gross and histologic pathologic images, we can gain an understanding of what causes the in vivo medical images to appear the way they are and learn how to use medical images as in vivo surrogates for gross and to a lesser extent histologic pathology.  With the successful mapping of the human genome and the rapidly advancing technologies of functional genomics and proteomics, we will soon be able to quantify the level of expression of every single gene and many different proteins from every tissue sample obtained.  Similarly, rapid advances have been made in functional and molecular imaging allowing us to gather much more than anatomic data from living tissues in vivo.   With the explosion of available data from in vivo imaging and in vitro tissue analysis, correlating these enormous data sets are much more complicated than the mostly visual "radiologic-pathologic correlation" methodology that we have relied on for a long time.  In order for medical imaging to be an integral part of "molecular medicine", we need to begin exploring the synergy between imaging and state-of-the-art tissue analysis techniques.  To facilitate this, we also need to collaborate with our bioinformatics colleagues to develop new analysis tools to handle the vast amount of data. implants and thalamic stimulator implants.