From Phineas Gage and Monsieur Leborgne to H.M.: Revisiting Disconnection Syndromes.

On the 50th anniversary of Norman Geschwind's seminal paper entitled 'Disconnexion syndrome in animal and man', we pay tribute to his ideas by applying contemporary tractography methods to understand white matter disconnection in 3 classic cases that made history in behavioral neurology. We first documented the locus and extent of the brain lesion from the computerized tomography of Phineas Gage's skull and the magnetic resonance images of Louis Victor Leborgne's brain, Broca's first patient, and Henry Gustave Molaison. We then applied the reconstructed lesions to an atlas of white matter connections obtained from diffusion tractography of 129 healthy adults.

The Surgical Illustrator: a web enabled computer program for documenting clinical and procedural details.

The medical record not only stores information on actions taken regarding patient care but it is also a source of education for those who read it. Nurses, residents, interns, students and consulting clinicians look to the medical record to gain an understanding of clinical disease and the diagnostic studies and treatment regimens used to affect the disease. We have presented our initial findings and our framework for developing and evaluating The Surgical Illustrator, a software program that will enable clinicians to include in EMRs information that is usually hand drawn in traditional medical records.

Visible Human 2.0--the next generation.

The National Library of Medicine has initiated the development of new anatomical methods and techniques for the acquisition of higher resolution data sets, aiming to address the anatomical artifacts encountered in the development of the Visible Human Male and Female and to insure enhanced detection of structures, providing data in greater depth and breadth. Given this framework, we acquired a complete data set of the head and neck. CT and MR scans were also obtained with registration hardware inserted prior to imaging.

The tale of Phineas Gage, digitally remastered.

The injury of Phineas Gage has fueled research on and fascination with the localization of cerebral functions in the past century and a half. Most physicians and anatomists believed that Gage sustained a largely bilateral injury to the frontal lobes. However, previous studies seem to have overlooked a few less obvious, but essential details.

3D visualisation of the middle ear and adjacent structures using reconstructed multi-slice CT datasets, correlating 3D images and virtual endoscopy to the 2D cross-sectional images.

The 3D imaging of the middle ear facilitates better understanding of the patient's anatomy. Cross-sectional slices, however, often allow a more accurate evaluation of anatomical structures, as some detail may be lost through post-processing. In order to demonstrate the advantages of combining both approaches, we performed computed tomography (CT) imaging in two normal and 15 different pathological cases, and the 3D models were correlated to the cross-sectional CT slices.

Linear measurements in 2-dimensional pelvic floor imaging: the impact of slice tilt angles on measurement reproducibility.

Objective: Magnetic resonance imaging techniques have improved the study of female pelvic dysfunction. However, disagreements between magnetic resonance measurements and their derived 3-dimensional reconstructions were noted. We tested the hypothesis that these discrepancies stemmed from variations in magnetic resonance acquisition angle.

Volume rendering of visible human data for an anatomical virtual environment.

In this work, we utilize the axial anatomical human male sections from the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project to generate three-dimensional (3-D) volume representations of the human male subject. The two-dimensional (2-D) projection images were produced by combining ray tracing techniques with automated image segmentation routines. The resultant images provide accurate and realistic volumetric representations of the Visible Human data set which is ultimately needed in medical virtual environment simulation.