• clinicians to develop individual, patient-tailored 3D models of heart disease, brain tumours and other conditions.
• clinicians to help to make early diagnoses
• surgeons to simulate different possible interventions
• to aid successful therapies.

The award was also given in recognition of Professor Ayache's outstanding achievement in the field of medical image analysis. He is well known as the founder of the ASCLEPIOS - Analysis and Simulation of Biomedical Images - project team, who focus on developing computational models of anatomy and physiology to help interpret images and to assist in prevention, diagnosis and therapy of diseases.

Professor Ayache said: My goal is to create, from the medical images of any patient, a series of computational models of his/her organs and pathologies to create a personalized "virtual patient" model. The medical objective is to make this virtual patient model realistic enough to increase the potential for early diagnosis and also to plan and simulate several therapeutic strategies to select the most efficient one.

Jules Hoffman president of the Académie des Sciences, said of Professor Ayache’s work: His outstanding research has firmly grounded the fields of computational medicine and surgery in mathematics and computation. In particular his work on the statistics of three-dimensional shapes, the combination of several imaging modalities, and the development of computational models combining anatomy and physiology is paving the way to earlier disease detection and more efficient and safer treatments for patients.