Johns Hopkins University
At Johns Hopkins University, we are collaborating with the Center for Imaging Science to determine a metric to judge the deterioration of the hippocampus, an organ in the brain associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's. The method involves using Computational Fluid Dynamics ideas to find the metric distance between 'normal' and 'patient' hippocampii and then using this metric for possible early diagonosis of degenerative diseases. This research is being done in the group led by Professor Michael Miller on the new IBM SP supercomputer at the recently established Whittaker Biomedical Engineering Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Also at Johns Hopkins, we are working with Professor Raimond Winslow, Director of the Computational Medicine & Biology Laboratory on modeling and imaging electrical activity of the heart using the IBM SP. The algorithm used for the modeling was implemented on the IBM SP by researchers at TJ Watson lab working in collaboration with students and faculty at the Winslow lab. An outgrowth of this work was a project to model Ca gain and gradedness in heart muscle cells, which has led to interest in setting up a joint collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and the IBM Computational Biology Center to do whole cell simulations.