Abstract:

This article presents three success stories that show how the coaction of mathematics and medicine has pushed a development towards patient specific models on the basis of modern medical imaging and virtual labs, which, in the near future, will play an increasingly important role. Thereby the interests of medicine and mathematics seem to be consonant: either discipline wants the results fast and reliably. As for the medical side, this means that the necessary computations must run in shortest possible times on a local PC in the clinics and that their results must be accurate and resilient enough so that they can serve as a basis for medical decisions. As for the mathematical side, this means that highest level requirements for the efficiency of the applied algorithms and the numerical and visualization software have to be met. Yet there is still a long way to go, until anatomically correct and medically useful individual functional models for the essential body parts and for the most frequent.