What it will take to create new Internet initiatives in health care.

Today's Internet cannot fulfill the anticipated future needs of health care organizations. To address growing administrative, clinical, and research communication networking requirements and to serve as a test bed for future technology, two separate initiatives, the Next Generation Internet (NGI--federally funded by the NIH/NLM) and Internet2 (a consortium of academic partners), are establishing project partnerships that will create new and improved opportunities for health care applications and interactions such as telemedicine, medical imaging, virtual medicine, home health care, public health, consumer medicine, medical education, and medical research, among other uses. In addition to creating and improving large-scale health care networking, it is also expected that much of the technology developed and tested for NGI/Internet2 will filter down to improve the mainstream Internet.

Virtual temporal bone: creation and application of a new computer-based teaching tool.

The human temporal bone is a 3-dimensionally complex anatomic region with many unique qualities that make anatomic teaching and learning difficult. Current teaching tools have proved only partially adequate for the needs of the aspiring otologic surgeon in learning this anatomy. We used a variety of computerized image processing and reconstruction techniques to reconstruct an anatomically accurate 3-dimensional computer model of the human temporal bone from serial histologic sections.

The Virtual Pelvic Floor, a tele-immersive educational environment.

This paper describes the development of the Virtual Pelvic Floor, a new method of teaching the complex anatomy of the pelvic region utilizing virtual reality and advanced networking technology. Virtual reality technology allows improved visualization of three-dimensional structures over conventional media because it supports stereo vision, viewer-centered perspective, large angles of view, and interactivity. Two or more ImmersaDesk systems, drafting table format virtual reality displays, are networked together providing an environment where teacher and students share a high quality three-dimensional anatomical model, and are able to converse, see each other, and to point in three dimensions to indicate areas of interest.

Limitations of distributed segmentation for three-dimensional radiological modeling.

While the use of three-dimensional models has been shown to be useful clinically, the specialized computational equipment and expertise necessary for their construction and use keeps these tools out of reach of most physicians. This paper explores the construction of a Web-based Java application that allows medical radiological models to be built on a remote server and navigated locally on the physician's desktop PC. This paper will also address issues that arose from a public, unrestricted testing of usability over the Internet, such as model size management, easy navigation, processor loading and security.