KUSCO is pleased to support 2012 KSEA-San Diego chapter general meeting which was held on Saturday, November 10 at the University of California, San Diego, Student Service Center. The meeting was co-organized by KSEA and KUSCO.
There were two speakers for the conference. The first speaker was Dr. Steve Jiang in the department of radiation medicine and applied sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He is the pioneer of using the video graphics to the medical field of cancers. Radiation therapy is the major method among cancer treatments. However in order to reduce any damage to non-tumor tissues during the radiation, the care team has to scan patients body, simulate the target location and irradiate with high energy at a specific target location. Since human body is a dynamic system, tissues and organs readjust after the tumor shrink in sizes after treatment. Then the care team has to re-plan the radiation location. It would take more than one hour to simulate and re-plan if CPU is used for computation. Dr. Jiang’s team started using Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) 3 years ago to compute powerfully with its inexpensive price. GPU does not require super computer center for such computations and has been a solution to overcome the time limit problem in this medical field. Currently GPU simulates the tumor images within a few minutes and enable the team to treat patients in a reasonable time. His projects drew attentions from media and many people come to his center to learn the new technology.
The second speaker was Dr. Minseob Lee, the president of Diagnomics. The title of his presentation was “Next generation healthcare from personal genomics”. The personal genomics would be the next $100 billion dollar project. Using the personal genome information, we can predict personal disease risk and genetic disease and we can apply to genome based diagnostics and therapeutics. However Dr. Lee sees two challenges in the field. The first challenge is the technology development to sequence massive human genome. The sequencing technology has been improved with a fast speed in the last two decades. He predicts it will take only few days by 2015 with the cost of few thousand dollars. The second problem is an IT/informatics problem in how to process the massive human genome information. The 700 PB (petabyte) of data was increased annually by 200%. The business road map of Diagnomics is to develop personal genome annotation system (PAS) and cancer genome annotation system (CAS) with the goal of using personal genomics to personalized medicine. His vision is to use personal genome information to predict outcome of drugs in efficacy and safety and reduce failure of clinical trials and improve safety of treatments.
