Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe it is, but what does it matter? In 10 or 15 years, we may well have the technology to improve our genes through technology (bigger brains, stronger bones, better healing capabilities, fewer defects). We won't need evolution any more. Until then, let's use current technology to help people less fortunate than ourselves get to that point. Then they can have kids without having to worry about passing their dodgy genes on to them, since they'll have been screened out while-u-wait using genetic tech.
So evolution ceases to be survival of the fittest and becomes survival of the richest.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Why does /. keep posting articles submitted by this guy? He has a shabby blog on radio.weblogs.com and does a poor job stealing other writers work; the site is a blatant commercial effort. Yet /. keeps putting Roland's stuff up and linking to it.
What's the deal? Is there some kind of commercial payola a la 1970's radio? Maybe the editor has a thing going with Roland, in a Clinton-McGreevy-esque way.
*Cringe* I didn't need any of those mental images.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=&query=roland+pi que&author=&sort=1&op=stories/
78 stories posted (with obligatory, self-promoting links) this year. That's about one every three days.
He even has the audacity to advertise [smartmobs.com] that most of his traffic comes from Slashdot!
"This blog, Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends attracts about 150,000 visitors per month, of which 60% come from Slashdot"
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 :)
Yes... to his little heart's desire.