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Supercomputer for Dodgy Tickers BOSTON -- Doctors here in Beantown may soon turn to one of the world's fastest supercomputers as an aid to fixing bum tickers and removing formerly inoperable tumors. A new IBM BlueGene supercomputer, recently installed at Boston University, could give surgeons real-time, 3-D visualizations of patients' internal organs as they implant lifesaving devices or direct robotic instruments through tricky procedures, scientists said. Rather than poking around in a patient while looking at a two-dimensional fluoroscopic image, implant doctors could work with a detailed, 3-D picture of organs and tissues produced by the supercomputer. Even the fastest desktops are not up to the task. Only the latest generation of supercomputers is fast enough to take the flood of data from a CT scan and turn it into a live 3-D model of patients' insides. "The value is the real-time capability," said BU professor of biomedical engineering Solomon Eisenberg, who is working with doctors at Brigham and Women's Hospital (Harvard Medical School's teaching hospital) on the 3-D visualization of patients' internal anatomies and implant devices. "That's the holy grail piece: to have computational aspect happen fast enough to inform what you're doing next, when you are in the middle of doing a lot of things," he added. BU's supercomputer has 2,048 IBM BlueGene/L processors, making the university one of the fastest supercomputer sites on the planet. It is ranked 59 in a recent survey of the world's top 500 supercomputers. The BU supercomputer is not much to look at, however. It is a rack of tightly packed computer nodes about 6-and-one-half feet high. Two miles of gigabit ethernet cable beneath a raised floor connect BU's supercomputer to the outside world and two Linux servers, which manage the computational tasks submitted by researchers. A giant cooling system, the equivalent of 10 large home air-conditioning units, keeps the supercomputer from overheating. "If the stack was any denser, we couldn't get rid of the heat," said Glen Bresnahan, director of the Scientific Computing and Visualization Group at BU. Scientists at BU, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the medical technology company Guidant have been using BU's Deep Vision Display Wall to see if the computer can predict how much electricity is the right amount for an implantable defibrillator to zap a failing heart back into normal rhythm. (An implantable defibrillator is a tiny version of the carts and paddles often seen wielded by TV doctors to resuscitate patients.) To adjust the settings of one of the tiny devices, implant doctors throw the heart into rapid uncoordinated contractions (a state called fibrillation), and then use the defibrillator to shock the organ back into rhythm.
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