Improving Patient Understanding & Counseling time reduction using visualization

Improving patient understanding & counseling time reduction go hand in hand from Medify on Vimeo.

Integrated Systems Europe 2014 - HoloCube

A lot of companies demonstrating their solutions for holography displays. For now still a gimick for commercial purposes, but who knows, perhaps in the near future similar 'displays' could be used in clinical practice.

Here an example from a company called HoloCube.

Surgeons: Operate With Kinect

Integrated Systems Europe 2014 - 3D Visualizer

Wolfvision showed a product at the ISE 2014 that could be a great benefit in teaching environments. Using a visualizer any object recorded will be displayed on a 3D screen thus providing a real 3D experience for the audience without looking at the actual object. As shown in the example, anatomy courses could really benefit from this innovation.

Check out their website here where a anatomical lesson of the heart is included recorded with their system. You can access the movie through the website, and even view it in 3D provided that you have a 3D screen connected.

Surgeons use leap motion to interact with imaging data during procedure

Check out the movie on YouTube

Realview - Holographic Visualization in the OR during heart surgery

Check out this video from Realview. They developed a holographic visualization system that was actually used in the Operating Theatre.
This really looks like a breakthrough technology that could have major impact on the way three-dimensional imaging data of patients is used in the operating room. Their current hardware looks a bit bulky for the already crowded OR, but this might become smaller in the future to allow real integration. Big advantage is the ability to have touch-less interaction with the 3D holographic image which is a huge benefit in the OR.
Also check-out their website at www.realviewimaging.com

TED: Printing human organs

And at TED there was a presentation on actually printing human organs:

http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html

3D printing is really entering the medical arena

Some hospitals are now moving to really using 3D printing in day-to-day practice. 3D printing is used to print a model of complex anatomy to help surgeons in planning their interventions. Read more at the Health&Science webpage of theWashington Post.

New and improved gesture based interaction for medical data using MS Kinect

The guys at iHealthLab in Italy further improved their gesture based interaction system for medical data using the Kinect. They have included interaction with 3D visualizations and all kinds of other cool features. Check it out at their website.

Preliminary version of e-book on Medical Visualization published

I've just published a preliminary version of my e-book on medical visualization at this blog. It is far from complete and some whole chapters are still unfinished or even empty, but I wanted to put out this priliminary version out for my students in the Biomedical Engineering course that I am teaching. So please download the e-book and give me your comments. Do you like it or not? What should be changed or added? Any comments are most welcome. New versions will appear in the near future on this page.

Just go to the e-books and whitepapers tab on this blog to get to the download location.

3Gear kinect gesture based interaction system

Check out 3Gear systems for their approach to use two kinect cameras to track motion.

According to their website their technology enables the Kinect to reconstruct a finger-precise representation of what the hands are doing. This allows us to build simple and intuitive interactions that leverage small, comfortable gestures: pinching and small wrist movements instead of sweeping arm motions, for example.

Virtual Holography for Medical 3D imaging?

Check out the coverage on the diagnostic imaging website on the topic of virtual holography.

They have an article on the development of two companies called Echopixel Technologies and Infinite Z that are attempting to join forces to develop these kind of displays in order to provide the 'real 3D experience'.

Infinite Z already is distributing holographic devices for mechanical engineering as can be seen from their website and the movie displayed below of a product called zSpace.

Advanced viz points way to personalized medicine

The era of personalized medicine has dawned. At its best, personalized medicine promises to improve patient care and outcomes, while better allocating healthcare resources, by individualizing treatment to specific characteristics of a patient’s disease.
Health Imaging News Portals | Advanced Visualization | Advanced viz points way to personalized medicine

Another application of visualization: 3D animation to explain a procedural problem in court

In this, Dutch, video an interesting example is given of medical visualization. This forensic visualization was made to demonstrate the procedure in which a surgeon left a guidewire in the body of the patient. 

Kinect based medical image exploration

The author directed me to this movie in a comment on an earlier post on their previous system using the wii remote. Now they have a gesture based system using the kinect. Looks fantastic and very versatile.

Gesture based control of AquariusNET using Kinect

Using the Kinect with the TeraRecon AquariusNET software. I'm only wondering how they change between the different operations since they do not show that. Probably they change the function using the mouse and then interact again with gestures.

ECR 2012 - SS505/B0375 - Towards efficient simultaneous multi-patient annotation of 3D imaging data.

In this presentation the authors described their method to segment a stack of similar images from different patients using a basic segmentation of one sample. They do this based on a weakly supervised classification algorithm to segment the complete set. Examples were shown to demonstrate the process where only a small amount of user interaction was required to achieve the segmentation.
They conclude that using over-segmentation through superpixels combined with local descriptors makes the labelling problem in multi-patient segmentations tractable.
One question after this presentation was about the clinical application of this kind of method. Most probably the highest value application will be in (retrospective) clinical research where often large sets of data from different patients have to be segmented to segment certain anatomical or pathological structures.

Human brain functional MRI and DTI visualization with virtual reality

Interesting paper on human brain functional MRI and DTI visualization using a virtual reality setup. The virtual reality setup consists of a cave with projection on one wall and the floor.The system included 7'6"x10' screens, using passive projection and infitec glasses for stereoscopic 3-D effect. The system also utilized an Intersense IS-900 6-DOF tracking system with head-tracker and wand.

The authors conclude that the application will have potential applications in basic research, education, and surgical planning. Continued development is needed to implement the tensor visualization, 3D stereoscopy and interactive visualization.

RSNA: Dedicated 3D labs offer many benefits

The production of 3D images using an on-site 3D lab, especially in larger healthcare institutions is a must according to Bradley J. Erickson, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
He states that 3D imaging is of growing importance in radiology especially in the multi-disciplinary communication and therefore a dedicated 3D lab should be established to achieve, among others:

• Higher standardization: With an on-site lab, it’s easier to get the same set of views for the studies that are performed.
• Single point of contact: A referring physician only has one place to call if there’s a question about an image. If there’s no lab, the radiologist will still get a call and that could impact workflow.
• Enhanced teamwork: 3D labs can act as a uniting force in an enterprise. Since the systems are expensive, there would likely be one central resource pushing departments to work together.
• Administrative buy-in: Since the lab would be an investment, COOs, CIOs and other decision makers who go with an on-site model will be on board from the start, and departments won’t likely have to worry about having the carpet dragged out from beneath the project later on.

Erickson also said that a 3D lab shouldn’t be considered a major money-maker, but departments should be in the black.

Read more about this topic in the Health Imaging report on RSNA: Dedicated 3D labs offer many benefits.

RSNA: Two handed 3D manipulation from Digital ArtForms

At RSNA Digital ArtForms is demonstrating a novel way to interact with radiological data called iMedic3D. This system utilizes two controllers based on magnetic tracking that are specifically designed for this task.

The way of interaction with the data is very intuitive and easy to learn. After a short introduction one can easily manipulate both 2D and 3D data. Exploration of the data utilizes novel ways of performing segmentation and window/level setting using the same two controllers.

Other than the systems that are using devices like the kinect, this system is more versatile because of the availability of 4 buttons on each manipulator.

For more information visit the website of DigitalArtForms