Physicians to Walk through 3-D Theaters

Crosslinks, a medical imaging company from The Netherlands, recently announced that it will introduce a new concept in medical imaging – interactive 3-D medical imaging software that provides 3-D visualization for clinicians by actually walking around and through an I-Space theater.
Potential clinical applications for the solution lay in diagnosis and treatment of disease as I-Space takes MRI, CT and ultrasound data and renders images for projection in three and four dimensions. The images can reportedly be played back to display real-time animation, enabling analysis of elements such as irregular heartbeats or the movement of muscles.
Crosslinks has formed partnerships with Silicon Graphics Inc. and Barco to aid in marketing, delivering, installing and supporting the hardware. “There are so many applications,” said Peter van der Spek, Ph.D., lead developer of the I-Space virtual reality theater at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam. “The first step is just realizing what you can do with it.”

For the abstract, “Dynamic 3D Echocardiography in Virtual Reality” published in Cardiovascular Ultrasound, go to www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1343588