Darkwind Media Blog

There’s a tidal wave of data that’s about to wash over us. I’m in a unique position right now where I’m able to see this wave forming and understand where it is coming from and how to deal with it. Medical data is rapidly growing, and the rate of growth is increasing. My vantage point right now is in one of the very fast growing areas. I also think it is a very critical area as well.

I’m referring to the data collected during medical scans. There are many different kinds: PET, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, etc. I’m dealing mainly with CT and MRI and the data sizes from these scans is exploding. This is a result of high-quality scanning and collection techniques. This should be viewed as a good thing. These machines cost a lot of money, but they can be used over and over. Higher quality scans produce better images to analyze, which in turn are easier to use as tools for diagnostics, recovery tracking, clinical trials, surgery planning, and probably a lot more.

What kind of sizes am I talking about? With the newest machines we are talking about Gigabytes of data per scan. Often in one sitting multiple scans will be carried out. For instance, many times, a scan is taken before and twice while your body is filtering a contrast chemical. That means modern machines can produce several Gigabytes of data per patient, per visit. How do we store this? How do we process it?

I don’t know about storage issues. I’m hope Radiology practices are solving this issue. I certainly hope they don’t just throw away your scan when you leave their office. My focus is on the processing. Currently Radiologists look at these scans as a series of 2D slices. With modern machines able to produce thousands of slices per scan this method is going to be very outdated very quickly. Instead we can use modern consumer graphics hardware (the video card in a normal computer) to reconstruct this scan in full 3D. This lets the Radiologist view the entire scan at once and interact with it in real time.

The data overload is an enormous barrier to this type of application. A modern scan will not only overflow the video card’s memory, but before long it could begin to overflow the computer’s main system memory. Managing this flood of data and feeding it into the graphics pipeline in a sensible way is exactly what we are tackling right now. It’s a critical problem, because we want Radiologists to be as effective as possible with this new level of detail.

I will post again when we have a more complete prototype of our new 3D Medical Scan Visualization software.