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

If only...

[Trouvist]

If only they truly had the technology they claim, they would have quickly been bought up by the GE's or Microsoft's of today. Does anyone here have any idea of the worth of an alogrithm that would automatically segment the entire human body for virtual exploratory surgery within reasonable timeframes?

Machine shop for the body?

[The Great Pretender]

Here we go: You scan an MRI, feed it in to the computer. Some Dr. on his sail-boat looks at the MRI identifies the area to be removed, and does a virtual surgery. The virtual surgery goes into the computer. The patient gets prepped, goes into surgery, a robot surgen following the 'virtual surgery' removes the offending piece.

It all sounds so nice and efficient, but I can see so many things were this could go horribly wrong. I for one will be sticking with the over-worked, stim-taking resident who will be standing by my body. I don't feel comfortable with the medical industry moving in the same direction as the car manufacturing industry.

my own 3D anatomy

[deathcow]

I went through the stages to donate part of my liver to my infant daughter in 2005. Washington University medical took a full torso cat scan of me, and then gave me a copy of the CD on the way out the door! (I did have to ask for it.)

So I take the CD, and find it has 3D visualization software on it. I ran it and told it to load all the cat scan slices. After it thought about things for a minute, Pow! Full 3D rotatable torso, I could dive in/out up/down whatever. I could change various colors and such to help see embedded structures like biliary tracts of the liver, or the tracts inside the kidneys.

Having been so close to a high end medical operation like a liver transplant for several months, I saw some wicked imaging tools. The ultrasounds they use to monitor my daughters new liver actually colors all the blood flow in blue and red (i.e. venous and arterial, though it is arbitrarily selected I understand) and you can move a trackball around to measure the instantaneous velocity of bloodflow in various veins or arteries in cm/sec with the click of a button.

You can bet that in 20-30 years this stuff is going to be VERY high end and we're going to stand a lot better chance at surviving some bad stuff. "Watch now! The nanobots are just reaching the clogged vessel as we speak, and you can see the bloodflow is already up by 1%, yes look here they have begun to expel the media into the colon!"

Re:my own 3D anatomy

[Chitlenz]

Isn't it cool?

I design the 3D diagnotic interfaces to these systems and I love my job =)

We just got a GE 3T Mri magnet put in at our flagship clinic in Greensboro, and it indeed has a magnet resolution of apparently 90nm (we were trippin on this when they fired it up for the first time...

The color ultrasounds are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with btw, and can get out of manageable control rather quickly. We had an cardio tech generate a dataset on a cardio ultrasound station spanning a 30GB resultset (and no... noone's software would open it ... )

Which package was on the disk? Lots of places use e-film, which is cheap and has a basic 3d modeller function built in. Thats a really cool app, and its been slowly taking over the low end of the PACS market of late.

Recently we've started to see ppl venture slightly into practice automation with stuff like autoinjectors for contrast, but AFAIK noone doing any actual sugery via MR or CT in the US just yet (though I understand the Aussies of all ppl have some early prototypes for working on sick ppl in the outback).

I think my favorite modality flavor is the CT, damn if those color 3d studies arent pretty =) We dropped in arterial tracing recently in our package, and its really fascinating to dig down to the rock bottom of the tech behind some of this kind of equipment. 64-slice CT is such a high resolution that you can now generate an almost photographic quality picture of someones face from the console our of a brain scan. The other day, I noted that on the 64-slice, we not only see everything in the subject, we can get the thread count of the shirt they're wearing =P Oh yeah... if you think CT techs don't make jokes about you naked .. think again =)

--chitlenz