Featured News - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 14:20 - 1 Comment

Iowa State engineers develop 3-D software to give doctors, students a view inside the body

James Oliver picked up an Xbox game controller, looked up to a video screen and used the device’s buttons and joystick to fly through a patient’s chest cavity for an up-close look at the bottom of the heart.

And there was a sight doctors had never seen before: an accurate, 3-D view inside a patient’s body accessible with a personal computer. A view doctors can shift, adjust, turn, zoom and replay at will. Software that uses real patient data from CT and MRI scans. Software doctors can use to plan a surgery or a round of radiation therapy. Software that can be used to teach physiology and anatomy. Software that puts virtual reality technology developed at Iowa State University to work helping doctors and patients, teachers and students. Software that’s now being sold by an Ames startup company, BodyViz.com .

Two-dimensional imaging technologies have been used in medicine for a long time, said Eliot Winer, an Iowa State associate professor of mechanical engineering and an associate director of Iowa State’s Virtual Reality Applications Center. But those flat images aren’t easily read and understood by anybody but specialists. Continue…