Board J A
Department of Electrical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
Crit Rev Biomed Eng. 1992;20(1-2):1-24.
Advances in computing technology (both algorithms and hardware) over the next several years promise to make increasingly sophisticated computer modeling of biomedical phenomena a routine part of biomedical research. Improvements in both the absolute speed of processors and in their programming and graphics interfaces will allow nonexpert users to bring computing power equivalent to the supercomputers of a few years ago to bear on routine research problems and to display complex data in understandable ways (visualization). Although biomedical applications have traditionally not driven the leading edge of computing and supercomputing, such applications are increasingly being ported to advanced parallel and vector processors. This paper summarizes the current state of biomedical computing, citing examples of the best practice in research today. A number of projects enabled by advanced computing from various subdisciplines are described. Trends in technology for both inexpensive (workstation) and high-end computing (vector supercomputers and parallel processors) are cited; the implications of these for biomedical computing are discussed. "Grand challenges" in biomedical computing, i.e., computational problems of major scientific importance that are beyond our current capabilities but that might be achieved in a 5-year time frame, are outlined.
在未来几年中，计算技术（包括算法和硬件）的进步有望使生物医学现象的日益复杂的计算机建模成为生物医学研究的常规组成部分。处理器绝对速度及其编程和图形接口的改进将使非专业用户能够将相当于几年前超级计算机的计算能力应用于常规研究问题，并以易于理解的方式（可视化）显示复杂数据。尽管生物医学应用传统上并未推动计算和超级计算的前沿发展，但此类应用正越来越多地移植到先进的并行和向量处理器上。本文总结了生物医学计算的现状，并列举了当今研究中的最佳实践示例。描述了由来自各个子学科的先进计算支持的一些项目。列举了廉价（工作站）和高端计算（向量超级计算机和并行处理器）技术的趋势；讨论了这些趋势对生物医学计算的影响。概述了生物医学计算中的“重大挑战”，即具有重大科学重要性但超出我们当前能力范围、可能在5年时间内实现的计算问题。
