A team of electrical and computer engineers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) www.wpi.edu have created a virtual human by digitizing and combining high-resolution images of thin slices of an actual human body. WPI researchers have teamed up with faculty at Harvard Medical School http://hms.harvard.edu to work on the project.
The highly detailed digital model is a tool that can be used to conduct virtual medical procedures and medical experiments. According to Sergy Makarov, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI www.wpi.edu/academics/ece.html, “There are many cases where doctors need to investigate what is happening in the human body, but it would be too risky or difficult to do the corresponding experiment. This process effectively will greatly help doctors and other medical researchers.”
The digital model was developed by combining high resolution color photographs of 5,000 cross-sectional slices of a human cadaver. The images were created for the National Library of Medicine which then made them available to the team. The team used a variety of image processing techniques to align the images and digitally stich them into a highly detailed three dimensional virtual human body.
The virtual body was then transformed into a model containing detailed information about the location and characteristics of the many tissues that make up the body’s organs and systems. The model will now be used as a computation tool to study how the body will respond to specific treatments and medical procedures.
In collaboration with Ara Nazarian, Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Makarov and his team used the virtual model to explore the tissues surrounding metal implants.
As Makarov notes, “The plan is to study how metal implants fare when an elderly person with a metal hip implant undergoes an MRI scan. Undergoing an MRI can be problematic and affect the patient since the metal is heated by a combination of a strong magnetic field and radio waves to create the MRI image.”
By incorporating a model of the implant within the virtual human, the researchers can then test the body’s response to the heat during various imaging protocols without exposing a human to any risk.
In other projects, Makarov and his students are using the model to evaluate the effectiveness of electrodes to treat Parkinson’s disease with electrical stimulation. In another project, the team is exploring various configurations of an antenna that may be used to treat tumors with electromagnetic radiation.
Nazarian reports that computational human models are easier to work with and are far less costly than conducting actual clinical trials. They may also help improve patient care when diagnosing diseases and evaluating treatment plans.
Makarov and Nazarian are currently seeking to license the virtual human software and make it available to research universities and to other medical groups. The digital model was developed by WPI’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and NEVA Electromagnetics, LLC. www.nevaelectromagnetics.com a private company in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts founded by Makarov. Additional support was provided by the Department of Neurophysics at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany.