Virtual Man Helps Guide Doctors

Scientists have created a computer program that's able to turn medical images into a full dimensional view of a patient's body — inside and out. The CAVEman (it's rendered in a virtual reality room known as a CAVE) will provide not only a three-dimensional view of a body and its organs but also show systems in motion, such as the beating of a heart.

The technology could give doctors or medical students the opportunity to investigate disease or try new treatments on a living system, without opening up an actual person.

"We can render a whole new scenario that would look like what you would experience if you had a patient," said Christoph Sensen, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and director of the Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics at the University of Calgary, Alberta.
The system has two main components: the computer model that renders the full-dimensional body and the virtual reality environment.

The model is based on images from basic anatomy textbooks. Graphic artists used those images to create animations of various body systems, including the organs, the blood vessel network and the nervous system. The model serves as a kind of generic template of the human body.
This model can be customized to a particular person when merged with medical images. For example, a doctor can combine CT scans or MRI's of a patient's heart or kidney with the model and see the person's organs within the virtual body.

Viewing takes place in the CAVE, a room about 33 feet by 33 feet square. Animated images are projected onto three of the four walls, plus the floor. The viewer wears special glasses equipped with shutters that flicker on and off, allowing each eye to see only one image at a time. This creates the optical illusion of dimension.

A sensor in the eyeglasses works with a tracking device on the computer to locate the viewer, should he walk around the virtual body. A joystick allows the viewer to do things like rotate the body or make menu selections.
Because the system requires the expensive, virtual reality room, Sensen and his team also developed a program that works on a laptop. The dimensionality remains, but immersion is lost. "I think it's a tremendous effort to build such a model. Before this, there were some simple models of the human body available for animation purposes in the movie industry, for example," said Anton Koning, research scientist in the department of bioinformatics at the Erasmus Medical Center, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

But this is only a start, he said, pointing out, "The real challenge comes when mapping data on that body."

For example, if a researcher wanted to show all of the tissue in which a certain gene or protein is expressed, showing one may be fairly straightforward. But revealing multiple genes becomes complicated. The information overlaps and may not be visually intuitive to the viewer, said Koning.
Sensen and his team have finished the adult male model and are currently working on finishing the female version. After that, they will complete a model of a child as well as other organisms, including mice and rats.

They are also spinning off a company based on the technology and plan to announce its existence sometime this summer.