Organ on the Wall

This article reviews liver surgeon, Rory McCloy’s operations that are guided by a four-foot, three-dimensional virtual profile of a patient’s liver that rotates at his command on the operating room wall in front of him. Using a specially outfitted mouse and his lap top computer, McCloy can manipulate the virtual liver to find the exact location and extent of a tumor before he makes even one incision in the patient’s actual liver on the table below. The high-powered graphic are available to McCloy by remote access on his decidedly non-supercomputer, with the help of a software called OpenGL Vizserver, also from SGI, which allows the data from the supercomputer to be shifted to other computers, even much less powerful ones, via a network link. The trick in making the technology useful for the operating room lay in finding a way to manipulate the images with one hand while performing the surgery with the other of the school’s computing center.