Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/128749
In the virtual environment of CAVE2 at the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory, researchers step inside an 8-foot-high, 320-degree, three-dimensional view of the arteries in a patient's brain, which helps greatly in noticing and correcting inconsistencies in computer models, among many other benefits. P h o t o : C a l l i e L i pk i n Strike Against Strokes Neurosurgical team builds strategic collaboration and tool that could revolutionize stroke prevention and treatment N eurosurgeons traditionally have used computers to evaluate patient-specific images, interpreted as well as possible by algorithms that model the brain and its blood vessel in 3-D, while researching what leads to strokes and aneurysms and how to prevent them. They've put together the puzzle pieces of arteries, veins and microvessels to create models that physiologically mirrored the brains of individual patients. But their viewpoint has been limited by the spatialimage resolution of even today's best computers. Recently a team of neurosurgeons at the college—along with other university professors, architects, students and engineers—found themselves in front of an 8-foot-high theater screen with a 320-degree, immersive, 3-D view. They had stepped into the next-generation, virtual environment of CAVE2, where images are seamlessly displayed, to try to solve a stubborn problem that presented in the arteries of a real patient's brain. This method could benefit hundreds of thousands of Americans who fall victim to brain aneurysms and strokes, the third leading cause of death in the United States. "We were flabbergasted," says Andreas Linninger, PhD, professor of bioengineering and lead researcher of a project to measure and model blood flow in the brains of patients with stroke. "We had been looking at computer models of a particular patient's brain for several months, but within five minutes of putting the model into the CAVE2, the chief endovascologist said we had connected certain arteries in a way that was inconsistent with anatomy." With that insight, they could correct their model; without CAVE2's ability to immerse these researchers and surgeons in their data, they may have still missed this significant data point and continued to struggle with developing an accurate model. "Today, almost all science is e-science," says Jason Leigh, PhD, director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Much of the data scientists investigate is collected, stored and analyzed digitally. CAVE2 gives us a unique ability to take that data and represent it in a large-scale virtual environment." Developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, CAVE2 combines the benefits of 2-D scalable-resolution display walls and 3-D virtual-reality systems, enabling scientists to study phenomena too large, small, dangerous, complex or distant to truly understand well without some augmentation of their perceptions. Once inside CAVE2, observers can change their scale vis-à-vis the visual model to make themselves feel larger than a six-story building or smaller than a molecule. This ability to zoom in and out gives them the opportunity to make close observations and gain powerful new insights and knowledge. "Scientific phenomena are observed with new types of digital instruments," says Leigh, "including sensors and robotic autonomous exploration vehicles capable of collecting data at ever-increasing resolutions. Natural phenomena from global weather systems to chemical reactions at the atomic level, for instance, may now be simulated inside supercomputers, generating massive amounts of data." "CAVE2 is the culmination of the lab's 20-plus years of expertise in virtualreality and in large-scale displays," adds EVL computer science faculty member Andrew Johnson, PhD. CAVE2 technology could prove invaluable for Linninger, increasing his and other researchers' understanding of blood flow in individual patients and helping to prevent and treat aneurysms and strokes. "CAVE2 is an enabling technology that modern, scientific, data-driven medicine requires," he says. "For me, it's essential to work with the EVL people and CAVE2 to maximize the learning effect from our very massively data-driven, biomedical research." illinois medicine | 7