Medical Device Link.

Originally Published MDDI September 2002

NEWS & ANALYSIS

Hollywood isn't the only industry that's exploring the potential of computer animation. Thanks to a collaboration between New York University (NYU) Medical Center and CyberFiber Inc., surgery students might be practicing simulated operations on computer-animated organs in the not-so-distant future.

Stephen Colvin, MD, and Eugene Grossi, MD, along with CyberFiber's CEO and chief animator, Aaron Oliker, presented the world's first 3–D animated beating heart at a recent meeting of the Western Thoracic Surgical Association in Big Sky, Montana.

Oliker told the roughly 400 internationally known cardiac surgeons in attendance about the graphics software his company used to model and animate the virtual heart. The software, called Alias-Wavefront Maya, was used in the making of such special-effects–laden movies as Lord of the Rings and Spiderman.

In addition to the potential applications animated organs may have for surgeons-in-training, NYU's Colvin sees the technology as providing a useful way of putting high-resolution data sets into animated models that can be studied with reference to individual patients.

The animated heart took 18 months to create, using multiple ovine data sets from a Stanford University study that were applied to a digital human heart.

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