Wednesday, September 26, 2007

3D Modeled Avatar Used To Help Doctors Visualize A Patient's History

Researchers at IBM announced a prototype visualization software that allows doctors to interact with the medical data of a patient by using a 3D modeled avatar containing all the patients records.

The technology named the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME)allows a doctor to click on a particular part of the avatar "body" and search a database of medical records to retrieve relevant information.

"It's like Google Earth for the body," said IBM Researcher Andre Elisseeff, who leads the healthcare projects at IBM's Zurich lab. "In hopes of speeding the move toward electronic healthcare records, we've tried to make information easily accessible for healthcare providers by combining medical data with visual representation, making it as simple as possible to interact with data that can improve patient care."

An example of this technology in action would be for a doctor to click on the spine of the avatar and instantly see all the available medical history and information related to that patient's spine, including text entries, lab results and medical images. If the doctor is interested in additional information related to a specific part of the spine, the doctor can zoom in, narrowing the search parameters by time or other factors.

One of the main challenges in the early adoption of this technology is the sharing of information among hospitals, clinics and other providers in a way that protects individual patient privacy.

3Dwalkthroughs.com envisions a future where this technology will evolve to a doctor treating a patient from a remote location through an avatar that links the patients real time condition to the doctor's computer.

Read the full article from CNNMoney.com HERE>>>

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