OSU Department of Biomedical Informatics

BMI at Super Computing 2007

Thursday 11/08/2007

The mission of The Ohio State University Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) is to be the worldwide leader in discovering, creating, and applying leading-edge biomedical informatics innovations to improve individuals' lives through personalized healthcare.


BMI applies distributed and parallel computing techniques to data retrieval and integration, imaging, simulation, medical informatics, computational biology, and comparative genomics. The Department's Multiscale Computing Lab specializes in applying advanced computer science methodology and specialized architectures such as GPU and IBM Cell Broadband Engine to biomedical application development. The Software Research Institute develops and utilizes software engineering best practices to encourage sharing and reuse of high quality software components. The close interactions between application driven computer science and computing middleware such as DataCutter, Storm, caGrid, In Vivo Imaging Middleware, and CVRG infrastructure to enable distributed and Grid computing in the biological, medical, and physical sciences. These research efforts have resulted in innovations in the areas of

  1. runtime support for distributed data processing and management,
  2. optimized data distribution and indexing techniques,
  3. strategies for efficient querying and processing of data in distributed environments,
  4. grid based security frameworks and
  5. tools to hide the complexity associated with developing grid applications.

BMI was created in 2001. Over the past five years, BMI has grown to eight faculty and over thirty students and staff. Since its inception, BMI has exceeded traditional expectations in the OSU College of Medicine and significantly increased its productivity in terms of extramural funding and publications each year. Much of this success has been built on research begun in the early 1990s by Dr. Joel Saltz, who has served as the first chair of the Department since its creation in 2001. Dr. Saltz research has brought international recognition to the University in biomedical informatics.

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