Imaging as Exploration

Advances in modern digital imaging methods are revolutionizing a wide range of scientific disciplines. They facilitate the acquisition of huge amounts of data that allow the visualization, measurement, reconstruction, and archiving of complex, multi-dimensional images. At the same time, advances in computing technologies enable the deployment of tremendous computing resources. This permits numerical modeling of a broad swath of scientific phenomena, and results in the production of vast quantities of numerical data. These data are just the beginning of the scientific exploration that modern computational and visualization methods will allow. But these advanced data generation capabilities require other enhanced abilities — with increasing data size and complexity, the development of more efficient acquisition and analysis methods is essential.

In this lecture, Lawrence R. Frank will discuss how this new paradigm of imaging exploration is manifest. He will explore how the increasing generality of approaches has led to dynamic methods for data analysis applicable to disparate fields, from brain imaging to severe weather.