3-D Software for 'Virtual Surgery'

Roland Piquepaille writes "Computer scientists at Brigham Young University (BYU) have developed a new software tool to perform 'virtual surgery'. This tool, dubbed 'Live Surface,' will allow surgeons to visualize in 3-D any part of a patient's anatomy with just a few clicks of a mouse. Similar software already exists, but according to the Deseret Morning News, Live Surface is interactive and fast. This software can be used for better diagnosis by physicians, but it might even suppress the need for some exploratory surgeries. The researchers add that Live Surface might even been used for special-effects in movies or games by extracting an actor's performance from a video clip."

Comments

Yeah, its us.

[engagebot]

Yeah, this already does exist. Because we make it. www.meti.com

We have a laproscopic surgery simulator for a mere $40k that will totally blow your mind. You can learn to stitch, tie knots, remove gall bladders, the works.

BYU press release link with more media and info

[Pvt_Waldo]

There is a press release right here from BYU that has links to various videos and other media. Can't seem to find any papers or articles about the process, though I noticed it's being patented so there may not be a lot available (?)

Been there, done that....

[Zarian]

I've been doing this for a while now. http://www.atlus.com/trauma_center/ ;)

old ideas, new clothes

[noneme]

Virtural surgery is not a new concept...I remember being in Junior High School and having the option in science class to disect a frog or to use a program on a 386 to move around .bmp's of a frog's anatomy.

The 3D model is an interesting way to put the MRI / CAT data on a computer screen (and far better than the .bmp's of a frog's organs) but what advantage (besides eye-candy) does this offer over looking at the raw MRI or CAT results?

One thing that could make this a great learning tool is an interesting interface that would help one practice a surgery with something more than a mouse or touch screen. Nintendo and Altus have already created a toy that does this, a far more intricate and realisitic version could be of use: http://ds.ign.com/objects/695/695152.html

Re:old ideas, new clothes

[VoidEngineer]

The 3D model is an interesting way to put the MRI / CAT data on a computer screen (and far better than the .bmp's of a frog's organs) but what advantage (besides eye-candy) does this offer over looking at the raw MRI or CAT results?

The answer is pretty simple. Doctors have to deal with information overload, and 3D models are an effective way of managing huge amounts of data. Consider: A typical MRI exam contains 60 to 90 slices. Looking at a single 3D image is much more efficient than looking through 60 to 90 2D slices and trying to form a mental 3D image in your imagination.

I work as a PACS Administrator for a Department of Radiology at a community hospital in NYC (PACS stands for 'Picture Archiving and Communication Systems'... I'm the network, systems, database, and applications administrator all roled into one). We have two 16 slice CT scanners and a 1.5 tesla MRI scanner... we average about 2,000 CT and MRI cases per month, and each one of those cases requires about 20 to 30 minutes of time for a radiologist to read. When you do the math, we have 4 to 6 full time radiologists on staff (at $350,000 yearly salary each), meaning that we're spending about $1.5M to $2M just on salary to get through those images.

Storage wise, each CT or MRI slice is generally 512x512 pixels, and works out to be something like 60 to 100kb, if I recall. So, a typical MRI series tends to be about 5MB or so. Different scanners average different sizes depending on how you want the images to spit out, but each series tends to range between 1 and 10 megabytes. The thing is, you might have up to a dozen series taken during your exam (those of you who have layed in an MRI scanner for an hour know what I'm talking about). A rule of thumb that I use is that an hour of our MRI scanner's time is roughly equal to 100MB of data. Each day, we generate an average of 1GB of new clinical data from our MRI scanner that has to be read by a radiologist.

So, consider it this way... each day, we have 3GB of data generated (MRI scanner and 2 CT scanners), at 365 days a year, equals a cool terabyte of clinical data each year that has to be read by the doctors. At $2M per year in doctor's salaries, we're spending approximately $1.50 to $2.00 per MB to get the cases read.

Anyhow... thought you might be interested to know some of the economics involved in reading MRI and CT results. The 3D models takes approximately 10 minutes to read, rather than 20 to 30 minutes to sort through the 2D images. The net result is that doctors who are comfortable with the 3D images can sift through 2x to 3x more cases. And because the doctors are paid on a per-read basis, that's the difference between making $350,000 per year and $700,000 per year.

All I can tell you is that when you start dealing with terabytes of MRI and CT images, they start all looking the same after awhile... and the doctors use any tricks they can to manage the data, simplify it, and process it. It's a clasic case of information overload. The 3D images help to simplify the 60 to 90 slices and to organize it into a coherent 3D object.

The other thing is that the brain has a whole section of it devoted to spatial and 3D analysis; so the 3D images allow the doctors to tap into another area of the brain when they're reading the exams... it allows them to mix up their daily workflow, think about things with a different part of their brain, and to literally get a different perspective on the clinical problem at hand.

Already done for non-invasive surgery

[mustafap]

A company I used to work for, haptica, developed this for key-hole surgery about 7 years ago

www.haptica.com

What was nice was that they used the Havoc physics engine - the Havoc boys were just round the corner from us in Dublin.
Those havoc boys, they knew how to party!