Video games that simulate the experiences of combat, space travel and car theft have achieved a startling level of fluidity and detail in recent years to create increasingly realistic virtual worlds. When it comes to medicine, however, the graphics that doctors and surgeons have to work with are closer to the grainy, cartoonish images of the Atari generation than they are to the video games Assassin's Creed or Grand Theft Auto. The computing power required to render virtually realistic organs and soft tissue is still unavailable to most physicians (except for a handful with access to supercomputers), but it's coming soon.
Within the next five years when medical professionals will be able to scan patients prior to procedures and create three-dimensional virtual images of their bodies, which they can store in computers and use for practice before performing the real surgeries. Tissue, muscle and skin are elastic and behave like a spring, and their characteristics can be expressed using classical mathematical theory. To develop virtual models of patients, physicians must create geometric representations of their tissue and organs using either magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT). The information that these scanners currently provide, however, is in the form of numbers representing shades of gray, which are insufficient for creating accurate, real-color, three-dimensional renderings.
More information:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-surgery-computer-graphic
More information:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-surgery-computer-graphic