The SCI Institute has been formally awarded a National Institutes of Health grant from the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative(BISTI). This grant will be used to create a Program of Excellence in Computational Bioimaging and Visualization at the University of Utah. The award totals $2,261,136, distributed over three years, and includes collaborators from the departments of Bioengineering, Radiology, Neurosurgery and the Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute (CVRTI). Through awards such as these, NIH Institutes and Centers seek to establish National Programs of Excellence in Biomedical Computing (NPEBC). Funding for the SCI Institute grant comes from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute within the National Institutes of Health.

In addition to multidisciplinary collaboration, the SCI Institute has two interrelated goals for this grant: 1) to support interdisciplinary research that relies on the important relationship between computing and bioimaging; and 2) to educate scientists who are capable of contributing to such interdisciplinary computational biomedical research. Proposed by the SCI Institute, the main focus of this research program is to create the computational techniques and tools to collect and fuse data from different sources, extract information, and display that information in a manner that is useful to the biomedical scientist.

The primary objective of the BISTI Consortium is to meet "the overarching need for intellectual fusion of biomedicine and information technology." BISTI was launched at the NIH in April 2000. This initiative is aimed at making optimal use of computer science and technology to address problems in biology and medicine.

The BISTI Implementation Group and BISTI Consortium (BISTIC) make recommendations to promote new understandings, collaborations, and multidisciplinary initiatives in biomedical computing. In this interest, they coordinate grants, develop associated research training, resources and scientific symposia associated with biomedical computing. For more information about programs, see the NIH Bioinformatics Web Site.