News
March 2007
3D vision stretches from medicine to space
By J.M. Berger, Globe Correspondent | March 26, 2007
Even by the standards of the new interdisciplinary science, it is a striking crossover: Astronomers borrowing a trick from surgeons.
Modern astronomy is awash in data -- massive sets of telescopic observations that are too complicated for the human mind to handle. This situation is not all that different from the plight of doctors, who need to make sense of incredibly detailed MRI images of the body.
Last week, Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing unveiled a modified version of 3D Slicer, a computer program developed to allow surgeons to explore an image of the body - zooming in, rotating, and moving around as needed to see the terrain. The modified version lets researchers do the same thing with astronomical data, exploring space for interesting surprises.
"In medical imaging, they know what they're looking for," said Alyssa Goodman, director of the computing initiative and professor of astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "In our field, we don't know what these things look like. So it's amazing when you can see something you could never see."
The project originated a few years ago at a conference on visualization technology when Goodman spoke about the need to model multidimensional astronomical data. Michael Halle, an MIT-trained computer scientist who specializes in medical technology, was there.
"He saw what I showed in my talk, and he said, 'We can help.'" said Goodman. "'We'll just need a little modification to the software, and it'll be great.' "
It sounded too good to be true, Goodman said, but she "roped in" an undergraduate student, Michelle Borkin, to tackle the project for her junior and senior thesis.
One region of space they examined with the software was a nebula in the Perseus constellation where stars are formed. Researchers found almost twice as many jets of gas flowing from young stars as the original analysis had revealed. The visualization also made it possible to see features in the nebula that had not been visible at all in the original imagery.
"There are some very big shells in the star-forming regions that are blown out by supernovas," Goodman said. "They're so tenuous that the connections of the gas around the shell would be very hard -- basically impossible -- to see before this software."
The software, which runs on desktop computers, is available to the general public on the computer initiative's website, http://astromed.iic.harvard.edu/, along with sample radio telescope data.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.