Predictive Medicine with HPC

I just attended a talk about using computer modeling to make medical predictions. Things such as modeling an aneurysm, predicting how it will grow, the blood flow through it, and the forces applied on the vessel wall . With these computer models they can determine what the dangers are and what coarse of action could be taken. They also showed computer models of drugs dispersed directly into the blood stream near the heart through a catheter. They wanted to see how well th drugs would be absorbed into the vessel wall.

The major theme was that eventually they will be using these computer models to make predictions about your future health and take proactive approaches to managing it, rather than waiting for something bad to happen and treating reactively.

During the Q.A. someone form the audience asked how much computational power was needed for these models (specifically the turbulence models in aneurysms and cardiac arteries) - is it something that a doctor could do in his office. The presenter said that it isn't something that could be done on the laptop yet, but can be done with a small sized cluster - they may run on 128 processors or as low as 16 depending on what they are doing or how quickly they need the computations. They don't require massive systems. He says ideally computing power will get to the point where this can be coupled with a medical imaging device.