Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

There is an irreversible evolution of medical practice toward more quantitative and personalized decision processes for prevention, diagnosis and therapy.

This evolution is supported by a constantly increasing number of biomedical devices providing in vivo measurements of structures and processes inside the human body, at scales varying from the organ to the cellular and even molecular level. Among all these measurements, biomedical images of various forms play a more central role everyday, as well as the exploitation of the genetic information attached to each patient.

Facing the need of a more quantitative and personalized medicine based on larger and more complex sets of measurements, there is a crucial need for developing

1. advanced image analysis tools capable to extract the pertinent information from biomedical images and signals,

2. advanced models of the human body to correctly interpret this information, and

3. large distributed databases to calibrate and validate the models.