Ten-year-old with sights on the Nobel Prize

The world’s leading institute for medical imaging science in ten years, the Nobel Prize in twenty-five. That’s the goal for CMIV, which just recently celebrated its first decade.

He’s not a man who blends into the scenery, a radiologist from Hudiksvall who, one winter day ten years ago, was brought by private plane to negotiate on a job in Linköping. He’s also quite forward when it comes to the future for his Centre for Medical Imaging and Visualisation (CMIV).

“The Nobel Prize in 25 years or maybe there’s something even better!”

A large crowd of invited guests with some connection to the birthday child gathered in Berzelius Hall at the Faculty of Health Sciences in Linköping. The speaker’s list was led by Linköping University (LiU) Vice Chancellor Helen Dannetun, who emphasized CMIV as a shining example of how courage, collaboration, and interdisciplinary science led to great success in research.

“CMIV found a solid home in Linköping. Important factors were involvement from Sectra, the medical technology company, and the county council, as well as the rapid growth of research in scientific visualisation,” Dannetun said.

CMIV’s first offices were a 4m2 windowless room. Despite a certain amount of expansion it is still housed in the middle of the hospital, with opportunities to study patients as a link to the research. To date, 40,000 clinical patients and an additional 7,000 research patients have been studied using the latest technology, in the form of magnetic resource imagers and computer tomography. On top of that, a large number of virtual autopsies, in collaboration with forensic medicine.

Anders Ynnerman is a professor of scientific visualisation and has a prominent role in the development of CMIV. He speculated over how the future might appear, provided that the Centre obtains long-term financing, a suitable location, and an administrative “shield”; all so that researchers might devote themselves wholeheartedly to research.

“CMIV 5.0 can generalise the visual concept, that is, handle imaging information in the same way we handle text and numbers. Beyond just taking pictures, we can conduct simulations of various treatments. Patient records can be transformed into virtual copies of the patients,” Ynnerman said.

The celebrations continued on August 17 with scientific lectures.

Programme: CMIV 10-year anniversary 

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Related Links
Faculty of Health Sciences at LiU
Vice Chancellor Helen Dannetun
Anders Ynnerman

Åke Hjelm 2012-08-16