In many ways, it’s already here, although the tech is still in its infancy. However, as we all know, technology advances at an ever-increasing rate, so it won’t be long until it’s revolutionized medicine completely.
Anyone who lives in a developed country will have accessed, or know someone who’s accessed, a computed tomography (CT) scanner, or a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. These machines take a series of 2D images and create 3D images from them and many surgeries, especially cancer surgeries, rely heavily on them.
What can medical image visualization do next for us?
The biggest change in medical visualization is how the data is obtained and, most importantly, how quickly it can be grabbed and processed, as well as how much information can be collected. The image visualization software from Bitplane and similar companies is leading the way in this movement.
There are CT scanners working now that can collect five 320-slice volumes per second, allowing doctors to see videos of a heart beating. It’s easy to imagine how useful this is when it comes to assessing and repairing heart defects, for example.
Recently there have been new diffusion imaging methods which show how water diffuses throughout the body. This is proving invaluable to research as water tends to follow structures like muscle fibers and nerve bundles, which are usually hard to image. Being able to see these structures is giving us big strides in biomechanics and neuroscience.
On a smaller scale
One of the most exciting applications for image visualization is at the molecular level, or the genetic level. Scientists are finally able to see pathological processes going on before they show themselves in the form of a cold, an abscess or even a tumor.
Of course, collecting the data is only half the story; the data has to be presented in an easily-analyzed way. Thankfully, there have been big moves here, too.
The ability to present medical data topologically – showing the surfaces of structures and objects – makes it easier to see and examine the outer surfaces of organs and thus to plan and execute surgeries more efficiently (and safely).
It’s what’s inside that counts
More recent image-processing tech allows for the addition of more realistic lighting and shading effects so that surgeons and scientists can look at internal organs as if they were a family photo. There’s even room for the hyper-real, with images that involve the layers beneath the surface.
These images are particularly useful in reconstructive surgery and work is being done on ways to create and display the end results of various surgeries. People often worry what their scarring will look like, or if they’ll ever look the same again and if not, how will they look? This tech will offer reassurance and manage expectations at the same time, hopefully.
Crowdsourcing medical data
Visualizing multi-subject data sets is also growing in importance. The idea is to take images of a certain condition from as many different patients as possible and to manipulate them to show how a disease progresses over time and within different populations. This is as big a challenge as the rewards may be, but it’ll certainly be overcome!
