Healthcare NBIC

Consolidating this blog at JPowers.IN3.ORG

Caught up in academic fervor over intellectual property in my graduate studies at the City University of New York, I've decided to consolidate my blogs and social media content onto my own server in order to "own my own logs."

For more on digital ownership, listen to Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen's outstanding talk:

Before and After IP: Ownership of Ideas in the 21st Century, Digital Studies Group, CUNY Graduate Center, November 17. 2010 (audio stream). Download: Ogg Vorbis | MP3

and for a more radical view on who should on what in cyberspace, read Mogeln's classic:

DotCommunist Manifesto

From now on, follow my work at my new blog address:

JPowers.IN3.ORG

Subscribe to JPowers.IN3.ORG via RSS

 

Art + Tissue Engineering: Biojewelry

Love and elective surgery rarely go together, but five couples are donating bone material to the Biojewellry Project at Kings College London where scientists are engineering the tissue into very personalized jewelry:

The couple’s cells will be grown at Guy’s Hospital and finished bone tissue will be taken to a studio at the Royal College of Art to be used in the design of a pair of rings. Following consultation with the couple, the bone will be combined with traditional precious metals so that each has a ring made with the tissue of their partner.

Funded with a grant of £66,664 from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the project culminates next month with a live debate at London’s Science Museum and an exhibition at Guy’s Hospital. The project web site has detailed documentation on the process and the participants.

See also "That Ring is So You" from Wired and "Rings of Bone Grown for Couples" from the BBC.

OsiriX: Converging Macintosh, iPod, Open Source and Medical Images

Radiologists are viewing and manipulating MRI, CT, PET and other digital medical images on the latest generation Apple Macintosh computers, and they're storing files and even viewing some images on the pocket-sized iPod Photo multimedia player, displacing expensive workstations, complicated file servers and proprietary software with store-bought consumer electronics gear.

Dr. Osman Ratib and colleagues at UCLA have re-written their previous generation Mac- and Unix-based Osiris system to take advantage of the Open Source graphics environment of the Mac's System X operating system. The new product -- OsiriX -- displays medical-standard DICOM (.dcm) files and can be  downloaded free-of-charge from the web.

As the web site describes it:

OsiriX has been specifically designed for navigation and visualization of multimodality and multidimensional images: 2D Viewer, 3D Viewer, 4D Viewer (3D series with temporal dimension, for example: Cardiac-CT) and 5D Viewer (3D series with temporal and functional dimensions, for example: Cardiac-PET-CT). The 3D Viewer offers all modern rendering modes: Multiplanar reconstruction (MPR), Surface Rendering, Volume Rendering and Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP). All these modes support 4D data and are able to produce image fusion between two different series (for example: PET-CT).

OsiriX demonstrates the convergence of some important information technology and healthcare developments:

• Open consumer electronics architectures
• Open Source software and utilities
• Streamlined development environments
• Internet filesharing
• Medical digital imaging standards
• On-line medical consultation and collaboration

An article on the Apple Developer Connection tells the full story, and the Osiris web site offers some stunning screen shots of DICOM images on the Mac. One of the coolest shows a kid displaying a PET CT reconstruction through the iPod's video interface onto a Sony Trinitron TV (above, right).