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Virtual Reality Helps to Treat Babies' Hearts
Roland Piquepaille writes "In Denmark, about 350 babies need to be operated each year because of heart defect. And their hearts are very small, so it's hard to know the exact kind of defect before the operation. This is why the Aarhus University Hospital is using virtual reality software to model babies' hearts, according to BBC News. Now, surgeons and doctors can visualize a magnified heart in 3D before planning cardiac surgery. This also allows a better communication with parents which can understand what's wrong with their babies before the intervention. As the percentage of affected babies, about one per cent, is probably the same in many other countries, let's hope this software will be widely distributed. Congratulations to these Danish doctors and software writers for this brilliant usage of technology. This summary contains more details and pictures."
Virtual Reality implies interaction. In this case, a doctor puts on some glasses and a glove, and can navigate/manipulate the hearts image to get the details he/she needs.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I was at the university and saw the 3D model of the heart, i must say it was pretty impressive, navigating around a heart in a 3D image created from the MRI scans with two simple tools is very cool.. Also some details for the nerds, they used 12x200mhz cpus to create the feed of 3x60fps, pretty amazing what those old cpus were able to create :)