Every patient comes with a different medical history and responds differently to the medication administered. This is where »Personalized Medicine« comes into play. On the road to personalized medicine, the healthcare system must be completely modified. Part of the technological base is provided by visual computing. At Fraunhofer IGD, we assist this transition from classic to personalized medicine.
Data is at the heart of personalized medicine. The physician uses sensor technology to examine the patient and feeds the results into the database. The subsequent therapy is based on visual computing in the same manner as the preceding steps.
We have already developed solutions for many issues of personalized medicine using visual computing. One example is the »KOHALA« Head & Throat Atlas (KOpf-HALs-Atlas) for radiation therapy, which allows us to reduce the assessment time for computer tomography images in the head and throat area from four hours to four minutes. The atlas makes it significantly easier for physicians to precisely identify structures such as bone marrow, larynx, and esophagus.