NASA uses EAI software in telemedicine application
Real-time collaboration, multiple use
NASA uses EAI software in telemedicine application
By DON LONG
Healthcare InfoTech Managing Editor
The World2World software produced by Engineering Animation Inc. (EAI; Ames, IA) could play an integral role in a new telemedicine application being developed by NASA researchers. The software is designed to enable medical experts in scattered geographical locations to view and analyze models of patient anatomy simultaneously and in real-time.
Tom Coull, executive director of EAI’s World2World division, calls the product a "general-purpose, client-server system that allows real-time collaboration and multiple uses." The emphasis, he told Healthcare InfoTech, is on collaboration specifically the ability of multiple users to view the same images at the same time.
A demonstration of what was termed a "virtual collaborative clinic" was showcased recently at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field (Sunnyvale, CA) linking five workstations three in California, one in New Mexico and one in Ohio with the Moffett Field site. Using the collaborative features of World2World, physicians participating in the demonstration showed how they could call up and manipulate 3-D images of a patient’s heart, skull and other body parts for consultation, diagnosis and treatment planning.
Xander Twombly, senior research scientist at the NASA Ames Center for Bioinformatics, said that it "took only two days to integrate the World2World system with our software, and created a linked version of our data viewer which synchronized, in real-time, the manipulation of an object between five viewing stations running under Window NT and SGI IRIX."
Coull described the World2World software as "very powerful because it is so general you can use it basically to synchronize any kind of data. Its limit is only a handshake’ limit. Its uniqueness is the speed with which it synchronizes that data, and do it with lots of data."
That data is not simply of two-dimensional graphics. Rather, the images World2World can send and share are both the three-dimensional and "fly-through" type that can be turned and manipulated in any direction, and viewed transparently for, say, planning of an OR procedure. World2World then allows those images to be deployed over intranet, Internet, Local Area Network or Wide Area Network.
About 80% of Engineering Animation’s business in is the production of software, according to Angela Cook, spokeswoman for the company, with the remainder in the production of interactive CD-ROM products. And "medical projects cross over into both of these areas," she told Healthcare InfoTech. One of its major projects is developing a 3-D imaging system for Guidant (Indian apolis), one of the major players in the cardiovascular device industry. Using its CD-ROM technology, EAI staff is developing simulations of the aorta which will allow physicians to more precisely carry out the selection, positioning and insertion of stents, key devices in many cardiovascular interventions. Developed in conjunction with Guidant’s Endovascular Technologies unit, the system is currently in Phase II trials preliminary to FDA submission.
Launched in 1980, EAI originally was focused on developing its animation tools for purposes of accident reconstruction, Cook said. Here, the goal was to satisfy the demands of trial lawyers who needed the simulations quickly to meet trial date deadlines. This application provided a natural bridge to medical uses for the software and then to "other bigger endeavors" in the medical arena, he added. Among these was participation in the "virtual human" project commissioned by the National Library of Medicine (Washington). (See Healthcare Infotech, Nov. 5, 1998.) In that project, researchers are creating 3-D and fly-through images of the various organ systems of the human body, starting with thousands of image slices translated into multi-millions of computer gigabytes.
A combination of imaging and telemedicine deployment of those images offers a scenario that Coull believes will be of tremendous benefit for both local and remote users. "A physician can sit in his office, pull up the results of a [patient] scan and discuss the results with the patient’s surgeon." Whether separated by two miles or 2,000 miles, several clinicians can look at the same image at the same time as if they were in the same room. Coull says that the most ideal situation of all would be that this system becomes "a commonplace way of doing things."
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