Supercomputer improves diagnosis of osteoporosis
July 3, 2008 | Source: KurzweilAI
Researchers at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and ETH Zurich are using a Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate human bone structure and predict where bones are likely to fracture.
The research could help bring clinical tools to improve the diagnosis and treatment of osteoporosis, a widespread disease that worldwide affects one in three women and one in five men over the age of 50.
When running simulations for a 5 by 5 mm specimen of real bone, it generates 90 Gigabytes of output data in 20 minutes. Dr. Alessandro Curioni: “Ten years from now, today’s supercomputers’ performance will be available in desktop systems, making such simulations of bone strength a routine practice in computer tomography.