Surgeons, intelligence agencies to gain from scholarship winners

THURSDAY 13 MARCH 2008

Allowing surgeons a real-time, high-resolution view of their patient’s internal organs and sending unhackable information further than ever before are the goals of two ANU students who’ve won scholarships from the Fulbright Commission.

PhD students Ramtin Shams and Sarah Beavan will be able to continue their work at leading US-based research institutes later this year thanks to the scholarships, which were established nearly 60 years ago to encourage mutual international understanding.

Studying for his doctorate at the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering at ANU, Ramtin is developing a new kind of medical scanner that would be able to create very detailed, three-dimensional images of the insides of humans, essentially rendering patients ‘see-through’ and aiding in diagnostic and surgical procedures.

“Existing real-time scanners produce low quality images,” Ramtin said. “I intend to use image registration and fusion of high-quality pre-operative scans with lower-quality images taken during the operation, to produce high-quality images in real-time and allow the surgeon to have a virtually transparent view of the patient.

To achieve his research goals, Ramtin will gain access to state-of-the-art imaging and massively multi-processing equipment during his tenure at Harvard University, which begins in June.

Bound for the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland is Sarah Beavan, a PhD candidate at the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering at ANU. Sarah is working towards a system that will allow unhackable encrypted information to be sent over large distances – something that has been previously impossible because of technological limitations.

“Quantum cryptography is an attractive prospect to organisations with high security requirements, such as government defence agencies, financial institutions and telecom carriers. The main impediment of such quantum systems is that information is lost exponentially as the distance between the sender and receiver is increased,” Sarah said.

“A so called ‘quantum repeater’ would be the solution to this limited range problem, and would form an essential component of any future quantum networks. I aim to demonstrate a quantum repeater at the JQI in Maryland. By incorporating the solid-state quantum memory that is being researched here in our laboratories at ANU, it is expected that this repeater setup will be more reliable and robust.”

ANU Media Office: Simon Couper 02 6125 4171, 0416 249 241