Virtual design prototyping applied to medical facilities

Over the past five years, MITRE has developed rapid 3D modeling and immersive environment capabilities that supports the application of virtual environment technology to many traditional and non-traditional domains [1]. This paper provides background information on these capabilities and describes the application of this technology to the experimental design prototyping of operating rooms of the future and to the design and retrofit of existing or proposed medical facilities. These capabilities employ contemporary commercial hardware and software and exploit stereoscopic projection displays and headsets. A unique user interface facilitates object manipulation within these immersive environments and addresses two key areas: 1) Visualization of the contents on the model server or library in a catalog form; and 2) Natural interaction and immersion of the user with the visualized catalog and selected visualized objects in a 3D synthetic environment. A brief discussion of two developing applications of this technology will be presented. In one application example, the modeling environment can be used to synthesize physical replicas (potentially full stereo scale) of actual surgical rooms used for training of medical personnel. Alternatively, it can be employed as the infrastructure for a new form of collaborative interactive visualization, namely, telesurgery. In another example, the rapid modeling capability provides designers, architects and medical personnel with a means of rapidly developing synthetic renderings of (potentially interactive and remotely operative) proposed medical facilities prior to construction. We also discuss key issues needing to be resolved for successful model interchange.