Winston-Salem Business Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 10)

BUSINESS Front Revolutionary new equipment and techniques broaden the medical landscape BY ANDREW HONEY At Wake Forest University School of Medicine doctor some information with which to diagnose the problem but how much more effective would a real live, threedimensional image of the patient be? An image that could be rotated so the doctor could see behind, under and through an organ, bone or artery with the click of a computer mouse. The doctor would have the ability to simply remove anything in the way of his view with the drag of a mouse and even go inside the organ to see if a problem exists. Let’s take a hypothetical case to see how this might work. A patient who had knee surgery a few years ago comes into a doctor complaining of pain in his knee. The doctor takes a three-dimensional scan and on the computer can peel back all of the layers until he can see inside the knee. The scan reveals that one of the original screws that were inserted into the injured knee has broken, causing the pain. Actually, the scans are of such high resolution that the doctor can even see the exact size of the screws. From a 20 second scan the doctor has three-dimensional imaging showing him exactly what is wrong and even the exact size of the replacement screw should he decide to replace it. Before any operation takes place, the doctor has a real-time, crystal clear, three-dimensional image of inside the injury itself. All of the imagining we have been doing in this article is in fact used daily at the Center for Biomolecular Imaging (Left to right) Director Kerry Link, M.D., Center Medical Imaging Engineer Josh Tan, and MRI/CT Technologist Debra Fuller Imagine medical professionals with the ability to do a complete scan of a patient. The scan would essentially go from head to toe, taking extremely small “slices” of information as it passes across the patient’s body. Each of the hundreds of thousands of “slices” would contain all of the information from one side of the body to the other. That includes skin, blood vessels, organs and bone. Now imagine that those hundreds of thousands of “slices” of the body could be captured in approximately 20 seconds, fed into a computer and the “slices” recompiled into a three dimensional image of the patient. Now with all of that data available, imagine that the doctor can use the software on the computer to peel away layers of tissue and see exactly what is wrong with a patient, all in three dimensions. Now let’s imagine that the doctor could then choose a specific part of the body – for example a bone or an organ – and “print” out that actual body part in three dimensions. By “three dimensions” we mean that when the printing was complete, the doctor would be holding an exact replica of the body part – the same length, width and thickness. Not a picture of the body part, but an exact replica of the body part. Just as an artist would sculpt the figure of a person from stone, so would this three-dimensional printer sculpt a replica of the body part using either potato starch and glue or, in certain instances, plastic. Consider that imaging has become the primary diagnostic tool in the United States. X-ray’s, CT scans and PET scans have the ability to give the 10 APRIL 2008

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Winston-Salem Business Magazine - April 2008

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