The Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute is a permanent research institute at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of D ...

that focuses on the development of new

scientific computing Computational science, also known as scientific computing or scientific computation (SC), is a field in mathematics that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems. It is an area of science that spans many disc ...

and

visualization Visualization or visualisation may refer to: * Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message * Data visualization, the graphic representation of data * Information visualiz ...

techniques, tools, and systems with primary applications to

biomedical engineering Biomedical engineering (BME) or medical engineering is the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes (e.g., diagnostic or therapeutic). BME is also traditionally logical sciences ...

. The SCI Institute is noted worldwide in the

community for contributions by faculty, alumni, and staff. Faculty are associated primarily with the School of Computing, Department of Bioengineering, Department of Mathematics, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with auxiliary faculty in the

Medical School A medical school is a tertiary educational institution, or part of such an institution, that teaches medicine, and awards a professional degree for physicians. Such medical degrees include the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS, MB ...

and

School of Architecture This is a list of architecture schools at colleges and universities around the world. An architecture school (also known as a school of architecture or college of architecture), is an institution specializing in architectural education. Africa ...

History

The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute started in 1992 as a research group in the University of Utah School of Computing by Chris Johnson and Rob MacLeod. In 1994 this group became the Center for Scientific Computing and Imaging, and in 2000 the name was changed to the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute. In 2007, the SCI Institute was awarded funding from USTAR to recruit more faculty in medical imaging technology. The SCI Institute was recognized as an

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...

Center of Excellence in 2008. In 2011, USTAR funding allowed faculty recruitment for genomic

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing '' signals'', such as sound, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniques are used to optimize transmissions, ...

and information visualization. in 2014,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

partnered with the SCI Institute to form the Intel Parallel Computing Center for Scientific Rendering to research and develop large scale and in situ visualization techniques for Intel hardware.

Research

The overarching research objective of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute is to conduct application-driven research in the creation of new

techniques, tools, and systems. Given the proximity and availability of research conducted at the University of Utah School of Medicine, a main application focus is

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, and Health promotion ...

. SCI Institute researchers also apply computational techniques to scientific and engineering sub-specialties, such as

fluid dynamics In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids—liquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including '' aerodynamics'' (the study of air and other gases in motion) ...

biomechanics Biomechanics is the study of the structure, function and motion of the mechanical aspects of biological systems, at any level from whole organisms to organs, cells and cell organelles, using the methods of mechanics. Biomechanics is a branch ...

electrophysiology Electrophysiology (from Greek , ''ēlektron'', "amber" Electron#Etymology">etymology of "electron" , ''physis'', "nature, origin"; and , ''-logia'') is the branch of physiology that studies the electrical properties of biological cells and tissu ...

, bioelectric fields,

scientific visualization Scientific visualization ( also spelled scientific visualisation) is an interdisciplinary branch of science concerned with the visualization of scientific phenomena. Michael Friendly (2008)"Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, st ...

, parallel computing,

inverse problems An inverse problem in science is the process of calculating from a set of observations the causal factors that produced them: for example, calculating an image in X-ray computed tomography, source reconstruction in acoustics, or calculating the ...

, and

neuroimaging Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive manner. Incr ...

Open source software releases

The SCI Institute releases

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software packages for many of the projects developed by researchers for use by the

and medical imaging communities. All projects are released under the

MIT software license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

. Notable projects released by SCI include: * SCIRun - Problem Solving Environment (PSE), for modeling, simulation and visualization of scientific problems * ImageVis3D -

volume rendering In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field. A typical 3D data set is a group of 2D slice imag ...

application with multidimensional

transfer function In engineering, a transfer function (also known as system function or network function) of a system, sub-system, or component is a mathematical function that theoretically models the system's output for each possible input. They are widely used ...

visualization support * Seg3D - interactive

image segmentation In digital image processing and computer vision, image segmentation is the process of partitioning a digital image into multiple image segments, also known as image regions or image objects ( sets of pixels). The goal of segmentation is to simpl ...

tool * ViSUS - Visualization Streams for Ultimate Scalability * ShapeWorks - statistical shape analysis tool that constructs compact statistical point-based models of ensembles of similar shapes that does not rely on any specific surface parameterization * FluoRender - interactive rendering tool for

confocal microscopy Confocal microscopy, most frequently confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) or laser confocal scanning microscopy (LCSM), is an optical imaging technique for increasing optical resolution and contrast of a micrograph by means of using a s ...

data visualization. * VisTrails -

scientific workflow management system A scientific workflow system is a specialized form of a workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or workflow, in a scientific application. Applications Distribute ...

. * Cleaver - multi-material tetrahedral meshing API and application * FEBio - nonlinear

finite element solver The finite element method (FEM) is a popular method for numerically solving differential equations arising in engineering and mathematical modeling. Typical problem areas of interest include the traditional fields of structural analysis, heat t ...

specifically designed for biomechanical applications * VISPACK - C++ library that includes matrix, image, and volume objects * Teem - collection of libraries for representing, processing, and visualizing scientific raster data *

Manta Interactive Ray Tracer The Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute is a permanent research institute at the University of Utah that focuses on the development of new scientific computing and visualization techniques, tools, and systems with primary application ...

- interactive ray tracing environment designed for both workstations and supercomputers

Notable researchers and alumni

David M. Beazley David Beazley is an American software engineer. He has made significant contributions to the Python developer community, which includes writing the definitive Python reference text ''Python Essential Reference'', the SWIG software tool for creati ...

- wrote ''Python Essential Reference'', co-awarded the Gordon Bell Prize in 1993 and in 1998 * Juliana Freire - developed VisTrails, Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

Amy Ashurst Gooch Amy Ashurst Gooch is a computer scientist known for her contributions in non-photorealistic rendering. She is currently the Chief Operations Officer aViSOAR LLC a data visualization research spin-off software company from the Scientific Computin ...

- developed

Gooch shading Gooch shading is a non-photorealistic rendering technique for shading objects. It is also known as "cool to warm" shading, and is widely used in technical illustration. History Gooch shading was developed by Amy Gooch et al. at the University o ...

for non-photo realistic rendering (NPR), authored first book on NPR *

Charles D. Hansen Charles "Chuck" D. Hansen is an American computer scientist at the University of Utah who works on scientific visualization. He is a Distinguished Professor, a Fellow of the IEEE and a founding faculty member of the Scientific Computing and Imagin ...

- co-editor of '' The Visualization Handbook'' * Gordon Kindlmann - developed

tensor glyph In scientific visualization a tensor glyph is an object that can visualize all or most of the nine degrees of freedom, such as acceleration, twist, or shear – of a 3 \times 3 matrix. It is used for tensor field visualization, where a data-matri ...

s *

Aaron Lefohn According to Abrahamic religions, Aaron ''′aharon'', ar, هارون, Hārūn, Greek (Septuagint): Ἀαρών; often called Aaron the priest ()., group="note" ( or ; ''’Ahărōn'') was a prophet, a high priest, and the elder brother of ...

- Director of Research at

Miriah Meyer Miriah Meyer is an American computer scientist and USTAR professor at the University of Utah. She is noted for her pioneering work in data visualization for research applications. She received an American Association for the Advancement of Scie ...

TED Fellow TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded by Richard Sau ...

and

MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

TR35 The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by ''MIT Technology Review'' magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. at ''Technology Review'' with lists of winners at technologyreview.com ...

listee, pioneer in

interactive visualization Visualization or visualisation (see spelling differences) is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and c ...

for

basic research Basic research, also called pure research or fundamental research, is a type of scientific research with the aim of improving scientific theory, theories for better understanding and prediction of natural or other phenomena. In contrast, applied ...

* Erik Reinhard - Distinguished Scientist at Technicolor Research and Innovation, founder and Editor-in-Chief for '' ACM Transactions on Applied Perception'' * Theresa-Marie Rhyne - founding director of the SIGGRAPH Cartographic Visualization Project and the

Environmental Protection Agency A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale f ...

Scientific Visualization Center * Peter Shirley - Distinguished Scientist at

recognized for contributions to real time ray tracing * Claudio Silva - chair of

IEEE Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics, developed VisTrails * Peter-Pike Sloan - developed the

precomputed radiance transfer Precomputed Radiance Transfer (PRT) is a computer graphics technique used to render a scene in real time with complex light interactions being precomputed to save time. Radiosity methods can be used to determine the diffuse lighting of the scene, ...

rendering method * Ross Whitaker - director of the University of Utah School of Computing and

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

External links

SCI Institute GitHubScientific Computing and Imaging Institute: A History

References

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