Better Body Images in 3-D

Reported February 2007

PROVO, Utah (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- MRI and CT body scans can show every organ, tissue and bone in one image. But picking out just one body part from scans isn't easy.

"Some of the very powerful and accepted medical imaging technologies that are being used to do that today cannot identify and extract just a single piece of anatomy," William Barrett, Ph.D., a computer scientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, tells Ivanhoe.

Thanks to computer scientists like Dr. Barrett, doctors now have a new tool, called Live Surface, that locates and picks out one body part at a time from CT and MRI scans.

"The ultimate goal is to give the end user, the clinician, a powerful tool that will allow them to be in the driver's seat and very quickly extract anatomy of interest from which they can make diagnoses," Dr. Barrett tells Ivanhoe. The interactive tool can quickly find hidden organs, like a kidney or heart, and peel back layers to reveal muscles.

Dr. Barrett says Live Surface allows the user to simply make a couple of mouse strokes and immediately, the object is identified. Once the doctor chooses an organ -- like a kidney -- to be revealed from a scan, the computer eliminates the parts that are not wanted, like tissue and fat. Then, instantly, out pops a kidney that can be viewed from every angle.

"There's nothing quite like seeing the anatomy in its three-dimensional form. And in fact, it can be a valuable ally to the patient to be able to say, 'This is what the tumor looks like,'" Dr. Barrett says -- creating a virtual roadmap to the body. He says medical physicists will be able to implement the Live Surface computer program in hospitals within a year.

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

William Barrett, Ph.D.
Medical Biophysicist and Computer Scientist
Department of Computer Science
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT
(801) 422-7430
barrett@cs.byu.edu

Ben Stein
American Institute of Physics
(for the American Association of Physicists in Medicine)
(301) 209-3088
http://www.aip.org
bstein@aip.org

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