Motivation: To inspire young students to become medical practitioners and biomedical engineers, it is necessary to expose them to key concepts of the field in a way that is exciting as well as informative. Recent advances in medical image acquisition, manipulation, processing, visualization, and display have revolutionized the approach in which the human body and internal anatomy can be seen and studied. These technologies offer advantages over the more traditional approaches, such as cadaver dissection, which may intimidate many of the students, and learning strictly from textbooks, which may not captivate student attention, and certainly will not demonstrate what is possible through modern medical imaging technologies. Thus an alternative solution which exposes students to modern medical imaging and promotes enthusiasm for the medical field should be implemented.

Objective: To create a learning tool that offers advantages over current anatomy presentation methods (anatomy texts, surgical video, dissections) targeted at the high school student. The learning tool will utilize a stereoscopic visualization to create a virtual reality environment in which the students may manipulate anatomical surface models (meshes) and view high-resolution full body medical image datasets acquired via Computed Tomography (CT) and/or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to virtually “dissect” the human anatomy by and “slicing and dicing” at any location of interest (i.e., brain, abdomen, chest or limbs etc.). Additionally, a surgical module may be added to this learning tool which would allow the student to perform simulated minimally invasive surgery on a mannequin.

For the original project proposal document, see the Project Readiness Package.

inspiration:

section in progress

Project Name

Virtual Reality Surgery and Anatomy Training Application

Project Number

P15083

Project Family

Biomedical Systems and Technologies Track

Start Term

2141 (Fall 2014)

End Term

2145 (Spring 2015)

Faculty Guide

Harold Paschal, hap8884@rit.edu

Primary Customer

Cristian Linte, calbme@rit.edu (585) 475-4926

Sponsor (financial support)

name(s), contact

Problem Definition

Systems Design

Subsystems Design

Detailed Design

Final Detailed Design

Gate Review

Build, Test, Document

Week 5 Demo

Publications & Presentations