IMFH | News & Events | 2006-10-20: USC urologist unveils 3D imaging software
The following article was featured in USC News: HSC Weekly. The original article can be found at http://uscnews.usc.edu/hscweekly/detail.php?recordnum=12899.
Roger De Filippo, assistant professor of urology at the Keck School of Medicine, recently unveiled novel 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) software that allows physicians using laptop computers to “visually swim” through the anatomy of patients and expedite diagnoses.
De Filippo, also an attending urologist at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, showcased the software at the Annual Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) in Chicago earlier this month.
De Filippo helped to adapt the technology, which was developed for use at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles by an independent contractor who specializes in 3D MRI.
Childrens Hospital is the only pediatric facility in the United States using this imaging technology.
“This is an entirely different imaging approach and it is revolutionizing imaging capabilities,” De Filippo explained. “Instead of physicians having to reconstruct data by reprocessing scores of images for each MRI study, they now can acquire the data almost in its original spatial orientation.
“Data is acquired as a ‘cube,’ and all of these cubes are stacked up next to each other until a full image materializes,” he said. “There is a lot of 3D software out there for CT scans and MRI, but what makes this unique is the ability for the operator—be it a surgeon, physician or radiologist—to manipulate, edit and dissect the image on a laptop.”
Instead of having 100 slices of possibly superfluous 2D sagittal data to pore over, “these are all compressed into one beautiful 3D representation that you’re allowed to ‘swim’ through and manipulate yourself.”
“Physicians,” he said, “can slice through the image virtually, rotate it, and take sagittal or oblique sections—whatever they need to get a better, more precise representation of the pathology they’re dealing with.”
