A public professorial lecture by Associate Professor Jiří Jaroš will take place on Friday 3 May

We cordially invite you to a public professorial lecture: High Performance Computing in Personalized Ultrasound Medicine. It will take place on Friday, May 3, at 11 a.m. in lecture room E 104 and is part of the professorial proceedings.This lecture will take you on an engaging journey from humble beginnings, a simple MATLAB code snippet simulating a 1D acoustic pulse propagation through an infinite, homogeneous, lossless medium, to the heights of sophistication with a comprehensive software package which performs complex ultrasound treatment planning calculations for personalized transcranial neurostimulation and photoacoustic breast imaging, harnessing the power of high-performance computing centers and cloud environments.

Jiri Jaros has dedicated over 15 years to high performance computing, scientific code development, parallel and distributed algorithms, and numerical simulations. His work has led him to collaborate with prestigious research teams in Australia and the United Kingdom, focusing on developing large-scale simulation tools for personalized medicine. He co-founded the k-Wave project (http://www.k-wave.org), which, since its initial beta release in 2009, has quickly become the standard software in its field, boasting nearly 25,000 registered users across 60 countries, including academia and industry. The software supports a broad spectrum of international research in ultrasound and photoacoustics, from clinical image reconstruction and model-based treatment planning to the fundamental design of ultrasound transducers.

Since 2013, Jiri has played a pivotal role in supercomputing at Brno University of Technology, managing resources that amount to hundreds of millions of core hours. He serves as a bridge between students, faculty, and supercomputing centers such as IT4Innovations, facilitating over 1500 students in completing their assignments on Czech supercomputers. In 2016, he began leading the Supercomputing Technologies research group and has been an active member of the Academic Senate at Brno University of Technology since 2017. He also holds positions on the Scientific Council of IT4Innovations Supercomputing Center and the IT4Innovations User Advisory Board. In 2021, he joined iTRUSST, the International Transcranial Ultrasonic Stimulation Safety and Standards consortium (https://itrusst.com/).

An accomplished scholar, Jiri has co-authored 15 journal papers, 4 book chapters, and over 60 indexed conference papers, accumulating more than 1,000 citations. He has led two Horizon EU projects and was a Marie Curie Fellow. Additionally, he has contributed to various other Horizon 2020. Horizon Europe, Microsoft Linkage, GACR, and FRVS projects.

Abstract of the lecture

Biomedical ultrasound is revolutionizing cancer diagnosis and treatment, offering a non-invasive, non-ionizing alternative to traditional methods like biopsy, surgery, and radio- or chemotherapy, with fewer complications post-treatment. To tailor therapeutic ultrasound procedures to individual patient needs, it's critical to use advanced physical models. A leading example is the open-source k-Wave toolbox, which has become essential in photoacoustic breast screening and transcranial brain stimulation over the past decade. Additionally, k-Wave supports advanced applications such as focused ultrasound for tumor ablation in organs like the kidney, liver, and prostate, as well as ultrasound neurosurgery and targeted drug delivery.

Given the complexity and computational demands of these applications, leveraging cloud or high-performance computing (HPC) clusters is necessary. The k-Wave toolbox is optimized for a range of computing architectures, including multi-core processors, graphics processing units, and extensive distributed HPC clusters. To manage the intricate computing workflows, the in-house k-Dispatch system was developed to offer a user-friendly interface for HPC interactions, ensure efficient workflow execution, and monitor workflow activities effectively.

This lecture will comprehensively explore the integration of the k-Wave ecosystem into routine clinical practice. It will highlight key milestones in the software's development, validation, deployment, and commercialization, tracing its journey from a technical innovation to a standard clinical tool.