Aug. 23, 2006 — As many as 98,000 people die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors that could have been prevented, according to two major studies from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Washington, DC.
Now, two new technologies being developed at separate universities could help make surgery safer and, perhaps in some cases, unnecessary.
The first is a program that instantly produces three-dimensional images of a person's anatomy. The software tool, called Live Surface, is designed to allow need for exploratory surgery.
"We'd just as soon make things as less invasive as possible," said professor William Barrett, who created the program along with graduate student Chris Armstrong at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
The data to create the three-dimensional images comes from existing CT scans, MRIs or 3-D ultrasounds. But identifying the structures of interest, extracting that information and rendering it rapidly is a challenge that researchers have been trying to overcome for decades.
Other software either requires a technician to render the structure manually or takes tens to hundreds of seconds to display the image automatically.
"If you are doing bone surgery, you would like to identify bones in the data and display them in a way that you would see during surgery," said Ron Kikinis, Director of the Surgical Planning Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
"Dr. Barrett's approach is a more effective way to do this kind of segmentation."
Kikinis is not associated with Barrett's research.
With Live Surface, the user clicks on the intended object with a computer mouse and the program extracts the image in half a second.
A doctor could use the image as part of a diagnosis to, for example, locate a hidden tumor or as a graphical guide during surgery.
