Visualizing Electronic Health Records With “Google-Earth for the Body”
Visualizing Electronic Health Records With “Google-Earth for the Body”
This is an IBM project and the title of the story uses Google Earth to describe the type of tool. The editors could have also used Skyline Globe or NASA World Wind to describe the concept.
What we are really talking about is 3D visualization for the human body (vs the Earth). Again, what you will read about comes from IBM.
From the article:
Andre Elisseeff leads a research team at IBM’s Zurich Research Lab that in September demonstrated a prototype system that will allow doctors to view their patients’ electronic health record (eHR) using three-dimensional images of the human body. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine, the system maps the information in a patient’s eHR to a 3-D image of the human body. A doctor first clicks the computer mouse on a particular part of the image, which triggers a search of the patient’s eHR to retrieve the relevant information. The patient’s information corresponding to that part of the image is then displayed, including text entries, lab results, and medical images, such as magnetic resource imaging. The doctor can zoom in on the image to retrieve selective information or narrow the search parameters by time or other factors.
“The 3-D coordinates in the model are mapped to anatomical concepts, which serve as an index onto the electronic health record. This means that you can retrieve the information by just clicking on the relevant anatomical part. It’s both 3-D navigation and a 3-D indexed map,†explains Elisseeff.
Source: IEEE Spectrum