[tt] The 3D patient record

[Hughes, James J.]

http://www.zurich.ibm.com/news/07/asme.html 

IBM Research unveils 3-D avatar to help doctors visualize patient
records and improve care

IBM's Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine provides an interactive 3-D
model of the human body that displays health information at a glance
News

Zurich, Switzerland, 26 September 2007-IBM's (NYSE: IBM) researchers
today unveiled a prototype visualization software that allows doctors to
interact with medical data the same way they interact with their
patients: by looking at the human body.

Created at IBM's famed Zurich Research Lab, the technology uses an
avatar-a 3-D representation of the human body-to allow doctors to
visualize patient medical records in an entirely new way. Called the
Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), this innovative
visualization method allows a doctor to click with the computer mouse on
a particular part of the avatar "body" to trigger a search of medical
records to retrieve relevant information.

"It's like Google Earth for the body," said IBM Researcher Andre
Elisseeff, who leads the healthcare projects at IBM's Zurich Research
Lab. "In hopes of speeding the move toward electronic healthcare
records, we've tried to make information easily accessible for
healthcare providers by combining medical data with visual
representation, making it as simple as possible to interact with data
that can improve patient care."

For example, when a patient visits a doctor's office today and complains
of back pain, the doctor will ask the patient about any history the
patient can recall, do tests, and visually and physically examine the
patient. After that, the doctor will usually sort through stacks of
paper records but will most likely not have access to the full patient
history and similar complaints.

The ASME 3-D avatar will allow doctors to click on the 3-D avatar of the
human body-here the spine-and instantly see all the available medical
history and information related to that patient's spine, including text
entries, lab results and medical images such as radiographs or MRIs. Or
the doctor might be interested only in information related to a
particular part of the heart; in this case, the practitioner can zoom
in, narrowing the search parameters by time or other factors.

Using advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art 3-D modeling
techniques, the IBM researchers are working to overcome key technical
challenges including integrating heterogeneous data sources and complex
text-based information-so-called unstructured data-and linking that data
to the anatomical model in a meaningful and easy-to-navigate way. ASME
also uses SNOMED, the systemized nomenclature of medicine that
encompasses approximately 300,000 medical terms, to create a bridge
between graphical concepts and text documents.

ASME is the result of a collaboration between IBM Denmark and IBM
Research. By bringing its sales force and its research organization
together, IBM has created a unique innovation team with deep
understanding of the industry and leading technical expertise.
The need for electronic health records

Advances in technology are driving great breakthroughs in medical
treatment and care, but today's health records do not fully take
advantage of what is available. Patient records are static and
flat-consisting either of unstructured data written on paper or more
structured text information stored in various databases. In either case,
the records provide disparate bits and pieces of information on
diagnoses and diseases; accessing a comprehensive history proves to be
an enormous challenge.

Because the industry is still in the very early stages of achieving
fully functional electronic health records (eHR) system, which would
enable the sharing of information among hospitals, clinics and other
providers in a way that protects individual patient privacy, most
medical professionals prefer to use paper records or their own
proprietary system for keeping eHRs. But what if a system could bring
together all these flat and static pieces to derive a dynamic and full
picture of a patient's health status in real time? And what if the
system were to provide this information in an intuitive and easy-to-use
way? With ASME, IBM researchers have now presented the first research
prototype of such a system-ASME allows navigating through a virtual map
of the human body, an intuitive approach for health care professionals.

Building on previous IBM healthcare IT milestones, ASME is the medical
information hub that semantically integrates information from IBM's
Health Information Exchange (HIE) with a virtual model of the human
body.

Moving forward, a vision for the future is also to explore integrating
speech technology into ASME.