The Department of Biomaterials, founded 2003, will focus on interdisciplinary research on biological and biomimetic materials. The emphasis is on understanding how the mechanical or other physical properties are governed by structure and composition. Research on natural materials (such as bone or wood) has potential applications in many fields. First, design concepts for new materials may be improved by learning from nature. Second, the understanding of basic mechanisms by which the structure of bone or connective tissue is optimized opens the way for studying diseases and thus for contributing to diagnosis and development of treatment strategies. A third option is to use structures grown by nature and transform them by physical or chemical treatment into technically relevant materials (biotemplating). Given the complexity of natural materials, new approaches for structural characterization are needed. Some of these will be further developed in the department, in particular for studying hierarchical structures. Part of these activities have already been started at the Erich Schmid Institute of Materials Science (Austrian Academy of Science, Leoben, Austria) by the small group of scientists moving from Austria to Potsdam in 2003/2004 in order to form the initial nucleus of the Department of Biomaterials.

More information can be found a the homepage of the Department of Biomaterial.

The bone research group experienced a very great loss on 18 July 2002 when its leader Dr. Lis Mosekilde passed away after a year long courageous battle against cancer. Lis Mosekilde was an exceptional kind and insightful person and colleague - she will be severely missed.

The bone research group at the Department of Cell Biology, Institute of Anatomy, University of Aarhus, Denmark consists of one scientists: Jesper Skovhus Thomsen (M.Sc., Ph.D.), two Ph.D. students, and one technician.

The group has developed new biomechanical testing techniques as well as new histomorphometric methods that have been applied in both pre-clinical and clinical settings.

The main focus of the group is to study the age- and sex-related changes in bone strength and structure in human vertebral and iliac bone through biomechanical testing and histomorphometry. Another important research focus of the group is biomechanical testing of rodent bones in connection with determination of the efficacy of different osteoporosis and osteopenia treatment regimens (pharmaceutical intervention or prevention treatments and the influence of exercise).

Current areas of research:

Preclinical:

Clinical (ex vivo):

The bone research group collaborates with scientists in industry and universities from all parts of the world (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Holland, Norway, Switzerland, UK, and USA).

The Group Nichtlineare Dynamik addresses topics in the research of complex nonlinear systems especially focusing on theoretical methods. Nonlinear dynamics is an interdisciplinary field of science which combines physics and mathematics with many other sciences. An important objective of our work is the immediate mutual interaction of our theoretical investigations and particular applications, as there are cosmic structure formation, problems of environmental research or even aspects of medicine and psychology. In the field of medicine it is of our interest, particularly, the 2D and 3D quantification of bone structure and its changes in microgravity condition by measures of complexity, the analysis of heart-rate-variability in connection with a predictive recognition of high-risk patients for the sudden cardiac death, and the diagnosis of Parkinson disease by means of synchronization analysis. In the field of psychology it is the cognitive complexity.

Nonlinear processes far from thermodynamical equilibrium can exhibit a richness of stable and unstable structures. Such systems are not at all exceptions from the rule but, quite the contrary, are very common in nature. Their investigation has revealed unexpected new insights, important even for epistemology which led to new paradigms. A well recognized fact are those deterministic processes which exhibit a behavior - the so-called Deterministic Chaos - structurally so complex that long-term forecasts fail. Such systems undergo unforeseeable irregular developments. In such cases small causes carry along severe effects. This behavior is very typical for feedback-systems: e. g. for the interactions of humans with their environment or the relation between health and the way of living.

Investigation of such nonlinear dynamics is still at the beginning. As it is still frequently based on oversimplified assumptions, one of our essential aims is to develop methods to treat such processes more adequately with respect to reality. In this direction we are working on the following fundamental aspects:

Another point of interest of our work are nonlinear methods for the analysis of experimental data, which links theoretical research to specific applications. The main goal hereof is to determine properties from the experimental data which underlie the observed phenomena. As opposed to experiments in the laboratory where the circumstances are generally well controllable, measurements in natural systems (like astro- or geophysics or physiology) additionally challenge data analysis: a typical difficulty is the irreproducibility of such measurements or that these observations often refer to transient phenomena. Consequently, we deal with the problem of stationarity. A very promising approach to characterize such data are complexity measures, recurrence plots, or synchronization analysis.

The activity of the group is closely related to the Center for Dynamics of Complex Systems. The goal of the Center for Dynamics of Complex Systems is to further interdisciplinary research and teaching in the field of Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems. We study in interdisciplinary collaboration the behavior of complex systems using methods of nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics. Beyond the development of new methods, we focus on applications of the theoretical results in a variety of different areas of physics and life. The Center puts its emphasis on organization of scientific cooperation in interdisciplinary research. Its activity also includes distribution of funds and preparation of new projects.

The Interdisciplinary Center for Dynamics of Complex Systems uses the resources of these departments to achieve synergy effects by virtue of common interdisciplinary research projects:

We organized several workshops and conferences, mainly to mention:

The researchers of the center have access to high level software tools like Mathematica, IDL and Matlab. The scientific library holds the main journals in the relevant fields. The electronic versions of these journals are available online. The center frequently hosts highly qualified researchers from worldwide coming for a short visit to give lectures and to exchange expertise.

Currently the Center for Dynamics of Complex Systems has almost 50 members from different university departments (biology, chemistry, general linguistics, geosciences, informatics, mathematics, physics, psychology) and research institutes (GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Potsdam-Institut fuer Klimafolgenforschung, Alfred-Wegener-Institut fuer Polar- und Meeresforschung, Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, Deutsches Institut fuer Ernaehrungsforschung).

The Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) is a non-university research institute of the State of Berlin. It operates in the field of information technology. Its research and development concentrate on application-oriented algorithmic mathematics, in close interdisciplinary cooperation with universities and scientific institutes.

The Scientific Visualization Department of ZIB develops new visualization techniques utilizing powerful algorithms from image processing, computer graphics, computational geometry, and numerical mathematics. Special emphasis is on analysis and visualization of 3D image data, especially those from medicine and biology. All algorithms are implemented in Amira, a software system devloped at ZIB for 3D visualization, image analysis and geometry reconstruction. The ZIB spin-off Indeed - Visual Concepts transformed Amira into a product that meets professional quality standards. ZIB and Indeed - Visual Concepts continue jointly to develop Amira, where ZIB focuses on the methodological questions and the development of innovative methods for use in scientific research.

Specific applications are supported by the development of integrated software environments, so-called virtual laboratories and (in medical therapy) therapy planning systems. Currently under development at ZIB are virtual laboratories for numerical astrophysics, biomolecular analysis, and neuro-anatomy as well as therapy planning systems for regional hyperthermia treatment and cranio-maxillofacial surgery. These application specific developments are done on top of Amira, using the developer version AmiraDev.

Current research projects in medicine and biology are:

The task of ZIB in this research project is the development of a virtual laboratory comprising image processing and visualization tools that support the quantification of changes in the bone structure caused by microgravity condition.

The Center of Muscle and Bone Research (Zentrum für Muskel- und Knochenforschung, ZMK) (formerly known as Osteoporosis Research Group) is located at the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at the University Hospital Benjamin Franklin, Free University Berlin.

The Center of Muscle and Bone Research (ZMK) is an institution developed on the basis of osteoporosis research. The idea that the knowledge about one factor, which could be a trigger of an illness, does not contribute to the complete understanding of the disease has been the reason to build an interdisciplinary research team. The center employs physicians of different disciplines (internal medicine, gynaecology, paediatrics, radiology, osteology) as well as scientists in the fields of natural science (physicists, physiologists, chemists) and information technology (computer scientists, mathematicians). Complex diseases need differentiated approaches which can be implemented only when interfaces between different disciplines are created.

The current main focus of the ZMK is research of the interaction between muscles and bones. The hormonal regulation of the bone remains as another research focus. Biochemistry, biomechanics, and molecular biology are intertwined research fields in our research center.

The main fields of our research are:

At the moment, the ZMK consists of 34 team members financed exclusively through third party funds. In addition, there are four team members who are employed and financed by the University Hospital.

A professorship for women's health research and osteology has been affiliated with the ZMK since November 1, 2000.

The ZMK maintains extensive international co-operations with other researchers in bilateral projects, projects of the EU, ESA, or in worldwide pharmaceutical studies.

More information can be found a the homepage of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Osteology.

Each of the movies below shows a flight along the same path through a tibia biopsy. Different techniques are used to visualize the trabecular structure of the bone.

The first one uses volume rendering. This technique can be applied to the original data. The user has to choose a lower threshold below which the data is rendered transparent. An upper threshold selects which data are to rendered totally opaque. The data in the range between the two thresholds are displayed as kind of a foggy material.

The second movie uses an isosurface rendering. Only one threshold is used to extract a triangulated surface out of the original data. This surface is then rendered.

The third movie uses a skeleton surface to display the structure of the trabecular bone. The project page at ZIB describes this method in more detail. The idea is to represent the structure by a triangulated surface which is placed in the center of each trabecular. This gives a visually less dense image than an isosurface. Another benefit is that scalar values located at the center of a trabecular (e.g. the CT grey value) can be directly mapped onto the skeleton. In the movie a color coding is used to visualize the grey value of the original micro CT data.

Fly through a volume rendered image of a human bone biopsy (proximal tibia, diameter: 7 mm, length: 25 mm). [small version divx (1.1 MB)] [small version] [large version]
Fly through an isosurface rendering of a human bone biopsy (proximal tibia, diameter: 7 mm, length: 25 mm). [small version] [large version]
Fly through a surface rendering of a medial surface (skeleton) of a human bone biopsy (proximal tibia, diameter: 7 mm, length: 25 mm). The local mean grey value of the original micro CT image data are color-coded onto the surface (blue: low, red: high). [small version divx (1.7 MB)] [small version] [large version]

A vertebral body data set is available for download on a special webpage.