Photograph by: Mark Mahaney
Surgeons use a program known as 3D Slicer to render three-dimensional images of the inside of their patients' bodies. But when Michelle Borkin uses the software, she's not peeking inside the body—she's peering into the heart of distant constellations. Borkin, who is just two years out of Harvard's undergraduate astronomy program, has recognized that astronomy and medicine, which seem to have little in common, are joined in an effort to see the unseeable. And so she is pioneering a new field with an unlikely name—astronomical medicine— which involves the use of medical imaging software to reveal the hidden secrets of the cosmos. "The medical community has poured millions of dollars into developing 3D visualization software," Borkin says. "Why reinvent the wheel?"
Traditional methods for visualizing astronomy data can be cumbersome. Researchers take a series of two-dimensional images of a nebula, for instance, much the way that a neurologist would image a series of two-dimensional slices through a patient's brain. But astronomers have not had the means to integrate those slices three-dimensionally.
After a Harvard doctor happened to mention that perhaps astronomers could use medical imaging programs to visualize their data, Borkin decided to pursue the unusual idea for her undergraduate thesis in astronomy. As it turns out, she says, the data she collects about star formation using radio telescopes looks a lot like the raw data that comes out of an MRI machine. She entered this data into 3D Slicer and immediately recognized the value of the bright, dynamic images the program generated. "You can instantly see where the dense regions are forming, where the high-energy jets are, where there are spherical winds coming out from stars," she says. "Phenomena nearly impossible to see with any conventional methods."
Borkin's research became the pilot project of Harvard's new Initiative in Innovative Computing and now involves a number of doctors, astronomers, and computer scientists. Today Borkin is a research assistant at the IIC helping software engineers refine the medical programs to make them more useful for astronomers. This fall she will start her doctorate at Harvard, focusing on the application of anatomical imaging to problems in the physical sciences. And even as she continues her own research on star formation, she continues to collaborate with doctors. "We're working backward now," she says. "Where we once learned from the medical community, we're now going to go back and teach the medical community how to do new things."
Listen: a discussion with Michelle Borkin
