3D Software to Model the Whole Human Body

Computer tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans have become so popular with doctors and patients since their creation, that massive volumes of data on virtually anything in the human body have been obtained. Scientists at the Iowa State University (ISU) have recently decided that the information is too valuable to be discarded, and have begun work on creating a 3D model of the human body that goes from the epidermis to the innermost layers of the body.

The model will be used in the near future by doctors and their students, seeking to understand the intricate nature of the human body. An Xbox game controller is all that you need to explore our make-up on a computer screen.

Two-dimensional images of patients' insides have been available to investigators for a long time, but only recently have we began to move in a 3D world. CT and MRI have revolutionized medicine, allowing surgeons, for example, to view a tumor in three dimensions for the first time. “If I'm a surgeon or an oncologist or a primary care physician, I deal with patients in 3-D,” Eliot Winer says. He is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at ISU, and also an associate director of the university's Virtual Reality Applications Center.

Working together with James Oliver, a professor of mechanical engineering, and the director of the CyberInnovation Institute, Winer created a method of converting flat images in medical scans into 3D images that could be shifted, adjusted, turned, zoomed and replayed at will. Funding for the work was provided by the Grow Iowa Values Fund. The state economic development program awarded ISU a grant of about $110,000 in 2007, for this line of research.

“This is a fantastic technology. More and more doctors are going down this path,” Curt Carlson, the president and chief executive officer of startup BodyViz.com, the company that is selling the new 3D program, shares. “3-D visualization is used all the time. But for the medical field it's a paradigm shift. And once doctors understand the basics of our software, they don't understand how they lived without it,” Winer adds. “It's fantastic to see the kids' eyes light up when they see this. They're completely engaged when they see inside a body with this technology,” Carlson concludes.