On October 10th, in Bologna, a meeting day entitled “The future of MAF” was  held, focused on the Multimod Application Framework (MAF), an Open Source software which enables the rapid development of the applications for the so called “computer aided medicine”. Since eight years the MAF framework is being actively developed  by an international group of experts coordinated by BioComputing Competence Centre (B3C), operated by CINECA, Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli and SCS srl.

The round table offered the occasion to discuss and to make comparisons among groups who contribute to the MAF development, groups who use it during their research activities, researchers who develop similar tools, and industrial groups with interest in it.  The round table aimed at defining the overall features of the next MAF version, started to be developed during these days. These features are particularly difficult to be defined in a middle time term medical scenarius, which includes the use of computer models in the clinical practice, the development of the multiscale modelling of the biological systems, the income of the architectures of multicore microprocessors, and the difficulty encountered by many different projects similar to MAF in keeping a model of collaborative development Open Source type.

At the meeting many experts - known at international level - participated, such as Marco Viceconti, founder and technical director of B3C and principal promoter of the European initiative “The Virtual Physiological Human; Stephen Aylward, responsible for biomedical projects in Kitware (a well known american company specilised in toolkit software VTK and ITK on which MAF is based); Alejandro Frangi, coordinator of the European Project @neurIST; Joel Baquet, European Commission officer within the Unit “ICT for Health”.

The event has been considered a success by the those, who participated in an intense debate about various technological and organisation aspects of extreme international excellence.  The meeting confirmed that within Europe there are high competences in the filed of biomedical informatics and computational bioengineering but, a scientific and operative coordination, between the two, is missing.  On one side, at the scientific level, the community it-self should organise periodic meetings among the biomedical software developers; on the other one, the participants in the round table agreed on the fact that the operative coordination of the projects for the development of big software for research (such as ITK project within the USA) is possible only through a strategic action at European Level.

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Additional information

• Multimod Application Framework (MAF) is an open source software framework for the rapid development of computer aided medicine applications. MAF is being developed by a consortium of international organisations coordinated by BioComputing Competence Centre, as part of the research activity of various projects funded by the European Commission and by other national agencies. For more information: http://www.openmaf.org.

• BioComputing Competence Centre (B3C) is the biomedical division of SuperComputing Solutions (SCS), a spin-off of the CINECA supercomputing centre, created to promote and develop the use of advanced numerical simulation in the industrial field. B3C develops and exploits highly innovative software technology for computer aided medicine. For more information: http://www.b3c.it/.

•   CINECA is the Italian Consortium for the Automatic Calculation formed by 32 Italian universities, the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics, the National Research Council, and the Ministry of University and Research. With more than 350 employees, it is considered the largest Italian computing centre, and one of the most important worldwide. For more information: http://www.cineca.it/.

• Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute is the most famous Italian research hospital for musculoskeletal diseases.  Located in Bologna, Rizzoli is a public institution, funded by the Emilia Romagna region and the Italian Ministry of Welfare. The excellent clinical units, where more than 150,000 patients are treated every year, are well integrated with nine internationally recognised research laboratories. Over 250 researchers trained as engineers, biologists, physicists, and medical doctors conduct strongly interdisciplinary research on musculoskeletal diseases, with particular attention to the transfer of results to the clinical practice.  For more information: http://www.ior.it/

• Marco Viceconti is the coordinator of the VPHOP integrated project, a large European research consortium that is developing simulation-based technology for predicting the risk of bone fracture in osteoporosis patients. Since 1989 he works at the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute where he is currently the Technical Director of the Medical Technology Lab. He is also the Director of the BioComputing Competence Centre. For more information: http://www.ior.it/tecno/.

Useful links

• The Virtual Physiological Human

• Kitware

• VTK, Visualization ToolKit

• ITK, Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit

• @neurIST project

• Unit “ICT for Health”