Project MISSION (Medical Image Sharing with Satellite Integrated Optical-fiber Network)

    Project MISSION (Medical Image Sharing with Satellite Integrated Optical-fiber Network) is an effort to demonstrate the feasibility and value of providing remote radiation treatment planning service by using the combined power of NASA’s Advanced Communication Technology Satellite (ACTS) and terrestrial networks together with several remotely accessed parallel simulation and visualization capabilities. ACTS is an experimental satellite that embodies several key innovations and has become a centerpiece of satellite-terrestrial communication networks for the 21st century. A distributed telemedicine system integrated by LIPS enables a radiation therapy expert at a remote site to plan radiation treatment for a patient at another site interactively in real time with a full 3D view of the patient’s anatomy from his/her remote terminal. In the background, the massively parallel dose beam simulation and 3D anatomical rendering are provided by specialized remote supercomputers, such as the IBM SP2 of Maui or the Cray at the Ohio Supercomputing Center, and by 3D visualization, from the SGI Onyx graphics supercomputers at LIPS or at the Georgetown University Medical Center. The full Project MISSION Website can be found at www.proj-mission.org, which includes sample runs, explanations and video clips of visualized images of body organs and the iso-dose coverage of the tumor.