Holograms on NBC last night (was "cameras, etc")

[P3D Stephen J Hart <sjhart@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tim Stabler <TSTABLER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Did everyone see the news article yesterday on ABC about holograph
>viewing for neurosurgery?  Was supposed to be so good as they could
>see in "three dimensions" so the doctors could operate better and
>faster.  I thought "3-D' was old hat business.......

I know we're not supposed to talk holography here, but since Dr Stabler
brought this up I figured a one-shot reply would be ok. Usually I just lurk
here learning stereo stuff from everyone else!

The ABC news item described my company's imaging system for radiology. We
make holograms from CT (CAT) and MR (NMR) scans. In fact radiologists have
used stereo in some contexts for many many years, but our system is more
than that since it truly is holographic.

Our holograms are recorded on 14" x 17" film, the same size as a regular
chest X-ray. Mostly they show damaged or diseased body parts at full
life-size. This is important when surgeons want to insert a surgical
instrument or prosthetic part into the image to judge how it fits, as shown
in the ABC footage.

Our system is patented and trademarked (of course) and has already received
FDA 510/k clearance. The results of independent clinical evaluations have
been the subject of well over 100 presentations at surgical and
radiological meetings and in refereed journals. A reference system in my
labs here has already been used to make over 6,000 holograms of patients.
Our first Beta installation is at a hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

How does what we do compare with regular stereo? Well, a true hologram goes
beyond what stereo offers: our images have a full range of near-field
physical depth cues including stereo, parallax (left/right and up/down),
perspective, convergence, and focus, but excluding occlusion. In other
words, you can move around to look from different viewpoints, as you move
nearer or further the perspective changes correctly, and depending where
you look your eyes converge and focus differently, just as they would for a
real object.

One major difference from most other display techniques is that everything
in our images is transparent, so inner details aren't hidden from the
doctors' view. This can be critically important to understanding clinical
problems, and as currently designed our technology isn't aimed at the same
applications as the stereoscopic / lenticular / anaglyphic / Pulfrich /
SIRD (hope I didn't miss anyone) techniques usually discussed in this
forum.

For (much) more information, please visit us at http://www.voxel.com/ where
we have technical and commercial data, QTVR movies of holograms, etc.

E-mail to me likely won't get answered in the next two or three weeks,
because I'll be in Chicago with about 50,000 other attendees at the annual
meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, the worlds largest
scientific gathering.

End of de-lurk.

Stephen J Hart                      fax              +1 (714) 348-8665
Director of R&D                     e-mail            sjhart@xxxxxxxxx
                                    WWW URL      http://www.voxel.com/

VOXEL, 26081 Merit Circle, #117,    The opinions and "facts" expressed
Laguna Hills, CA 92653-7017, USA    herein are not necessarily correct



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