Overview

A. Mission

• Maintain high-quality application-driven research environment to train both graduate and REU students to be highly competitive and productive within multi-disciplinary settings.
• Create learning opportunities to motivate and excite undergraduate and high-school students to pursue studies in STEM education.
• Initiate entrepreneurial opportunities to transfer technology from the lab to industry and create new opportunities for funding our basic research in challenging and emerging areas like image-driven modeling.

The CRTC's PhD students are placed or recruited at top research medical schools and groups in the US (eg. Harvard and NIH), research labs (LANL, PNNL, MPI in Germany) and companies (Dassault Systems, Ansys, Synopsys, MSC, Corvid Technologies, Broncus Inc. and Alter). Given this record and extensive network of collaborations that span across four continents, nine countries and 17 Universities and Medical Schools we are well positioned to continue and improve our record in: innovation, productivity, outreach and entrepreneurial activities. The CRTC's innovation and publications record is second to none when it comes to the production of technologies that work in parallel mesh generation and real-time FE-based medical image computing.

B. Strategic Planning

The CRTC's long term strategic planning is aligned with:

• Our nation’s priorities to reduce cost in healthcare without compromising quality and in many cases improve quality
• With NIA's and NASA/Langley priorities to help contribute in modeling and simulation to predict aerodynamic characteristics of configurations at conditions that cannot be simulated in ground test facilities, or safely tested in flight and thus contribute in national security and competitiveness of our transportation and defense industries
• Our nation's priority to invest in e-learning technologies and in the CRTC's case, we target the vital area of STEM K-12 education by developing a niche for geometry where we can leverage our background and record in Engineering Geometry.

C. Cross-cutting research with emphasis in Biomedicine/Healthcare, HPC Runtime Software Systems, and STEM Education

In addition to our work on enabling technologies for Image Guided Neurosurgery for brain cancer with Harvard Medical School and Fudan University, Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson’s disease with VCU and Endoscopic Sinus/Skullbase Surgery with EVMS, the CRTC's technologies for non-rigid registration and real-time medical image fusion and I2M conversion are used in many applications in Image Guided Diagnosis and Therapy, Life Sciences and engineering applications. We actively pursue such interdisciplinary opportunities within Virginia, the US and abroad. In the area of STEM education, our initial focus is on developing a framework for performing empirical studies on the effects of video lectures on K-12 students' learning.