Medical applications of digital image morphing

The authors present a unique medical technical application for illustrating the success and/or failure of the physiological healing process as a dynamically morphed video. Two examples used in this report include the healing of a severely fractured humerus from an explosion in Iraq and the other of dramatic tissue destruction from a poisonous spider bite. For the humerus, several sequential x-rays obtained throughout orthopedic surgical procedures and the healing process were morphed together representing a time-lapsed video of the healing process. The end result is a video that demonstrates the healing process in an animation that radiologists envision and report to other clinicians. For the brown recluse spider bite, a seemingly benign skin lesion transforms into a wide gaping necrotic wound with dramatic appearance within days. This novel technique is not presented for readily apparent clinical advantage, rather, it may have more immediate application in providing treatment options to referring providers and/or patients, as well as educational value of healing or disease progression over time. Image morphing is one of those innovations that is just starting to come into its own. Morphing is an image processing technology that transforms one image into another by generating a series of intermediate synthetic images. It is the same process that Hollywood uses to turn people into animals in movies, for example. The ability to perform morphing, once restricted to high-end graphics workstations, is now widely available for desktop computers. The authors describe how a series of radiographic images were morphed into a short movie clip using readily available software and an average laptop. The resultant video showed the healing process of an open comminuted humerus fracture that helped demonstrate how amazingly the human body heals in a case presentation in a time-lapse fashion.