November 2006
iAnatomy uses ORION and multicast to transform medical education
Northern Ontario School of Medicine collaborates with Stanford
The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) is making use of ORION's advanced multicasting capabilities to collaborate with California's Stanford School of Medicine and participate in the new iAnatomy initiative.
The medical imaging collaboration is part of an ambitious global effort to digitize all of the world's medical knowledge and introduce new tools and advanced technologies to transform the way medicine is taught and learned.
The iAnatomy project, now in its testing phase, allows NOSM faculty and students to view and manipulate hyper-realistic tissue objects using advanced 3D stereoscopic equipment.
3D digitized image from the recent Northern Ontario School of Medicine ORION multicast test of the iAnatony program, at the Laurentian University campus.
The application uses propriety software developed by Stanford, sharing datasets over the ORION network, CAnet 4 and CENIC, California's advanced research and education network.
"The process requires an advanced network with multicast capabilities and we would not be able to participate in this project without access to ORION," says Mike Korolenko, eLearning Research & Development Specialist, with the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.
Unlike a unicast of a standard video signal over the Internet, a multicast application makes use of the 'spider web' of interconnecting points on multicast-enabled IP networks, like ORION, to allow a signal from a single point on the network to be multicast to multiple locations, using the same bandwidth.
ORION staff recently assisted with successful multicast testing of the application between Laurentian University and Stanford, paving the way for the introduction of the new resource throughout the school.
The new school of medicine shares two campus locations, at Laurentian University in Sudbury and Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, a distance of 670 kilometres. The connection of the two locations over ORION enables the institutions to function as one, integrated facility.
3D digitized image from the recent Northern Ontario School of Medicine ORION multicast test of the iAnatony program, at the Laurentian University campus.
The iAnatomy project uses a Remote Stereo Viewer Application developed by Dr. Steven Senger of the University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse, with the Haptic Audio Visual Network for Education and Training (HAVnet) Project. It not only allows participants, wearing stereo viewing instruments, to view high-definition, three dimensional objects, such as hearts and lungs, it also allows participants to 'take control' of the object and lead sessions involving multiple users in different locations over the network.
The project, led out of the Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies office, operates an interactive server.
It has an ambitious goal, to provide images, movies, text, live video, and interactive Java 3D models for teaching surgeons anatomy of every piece of the human body and every surgical skill ever developed.
Medical students now mostly learn anatomy from textbooks and they learn surgical skills as an apprentice to a trained surgeon or operating on real patients. It is hoped that the iAnatomy project, however, will help consolidate all anatomical and surgical knowledge into one open, multimedia, interactive server to improve the way surgeons around the world are trained.
Dr. David Topps, who leads the project at NOSM, says participating in this initiative is crucial, especially for the new school of medicine, which is gaining recognition for its leadership in the field of medical remote and distance learning.
"Active learning is always more effective than passive. Interactive exploration, peeling away layer after virtual layer, is so much more engaging - the students can learn better by "playing with the models... from anywhere at anytime," says Dr. Topps.
"The Bassett Collection, painstakingly assembled over 30 years at Stanford, will now be available in full detail for any of our students," he adds.
The Bassett collection was created by Dr. David Bassett in a process that involved cadaver dissections and photography in the 1950's and 1960's. For medical schools, access to this comprehensive collection of labelled and annotated stereoscopic images of the human anatomy is one of the most desirable aspects of the iAnatomy project.
Use of the resource is consistent with the NOSM's policy against the use of cadavers in its own medical teaching programs.
It is expected that iAnatomy resources will be made available and integrated in the teaching and learning programmes at the northern school over the next several months.
NOSM and Stanford are also planning a workshop on iAnatomy for faculty and students in early December.
Learn more about iAnatomy at http://ianatomy.stanford.edu and about the Bassett Collection. Visit the NOSM at www.normed.ca.
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