Computer graphics in medicine

M edical images hold us captive. X-rays of your daughter’s broken leg or a magnetic resonance scan of your father’s brain tumor emit a tractor-beam that grabs your attention. With those images, we see clearly what is otherwise hidden from us and potentially lethal to a loved one. Computer graphics is integral to the imaging systems that deliver this information. Our fixation on this miracle of discovery and our fascination with our own physiology compel us to push the technology further. Together, computer graphics and medicine have generated entirely new views of anatomy. So much new image information is available about the anatomic structure and pathology of disease that clinicians have been warned to expect more diseases to be detectable by imaging in the future. Yet technology races ahead, leaving clinical medicine to sort through the discoveries. What is useful? What can help health care now? As in other disciplines, the medical community needs to catch up with technology. Matching new information with the appropriate clinical response is the challenge confronting us. This process always takes time. Early applications of computer graphics in medicine captured the imagination of the radiology community. For example, dramatic 3D views of bone and soft tissue were a necessity at any radiology conference in the late 1970s. Yet this technology has only recently reached clinical practice and has not yet become routine. Medical applications of computer graphics will not succeed unless they replace or eliminate more expensive procedures. We need to justify the information we deliver now in the context of clinical problems needing solutions. We also need to avoid the spiral where the diagnostic power of new imaging technologies accelerates our rush to respond with similarly high-tech (expensive) therapy.