10/16/97
CONTACT: Jody Sumrall, (650) 723-7897 or 723-6911
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SPACE AGENCY LAUNCHES NATIONAL BIOCOMPUTATION CENTER AT STANFORD
STANFORD -- The Stanford University School of Medicine has become the home for a NASA-sponsored national biocomputation center in which researchers will apply complex computing skills to the practice of medicine.
The new center initially will focus on the use of virtual reality in medicine but later will include a wide range of other projects, both inside and outside Stanford, that marry computer science with biology, said the center's director, Dr. Stephen Schendel, professor and chair of functional restoration at the School of Medicine.
"There is going to be a tremendous need to bring together these two disciplines -- computer science and medicine -- at the national level," said Dr. Edward Holmes, senior associate dean for research and vice president for translational medicine and clinical research at Stanford.
The center, which remains unnamed, was formally created in signing ceremonies held Sept. 19 at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. The space agency has agreed to provide $500,000 per year over the next five years to support the new enterprise.
The center grew out of a project begun two years ago by Schendel and Dr. Muriel Ross, a NASA neuroscientist and director of the Biocomputation Center at the Moffett Field research site. Together, Schendel and Ross developed a virtual-surgery workbench that enables surgeons to visualize a complex surgery in a 3-D environment before they walk into the operating room. The big-screen workbench includes special gloves, computer tracking wands and software to manipulate a 3-D image of a patient.
Schendel, a specialist in craniofacial surgery, said he already has made use of the workbench with some of his patients. The workbench also serves as a powerful tool for training students, he said.
Schendel initially had planned to submit a small grant proposal to continue the work, but NASA officials were so pleased with the project that they encouraged him to think in broader terms, he said.
Thus, the idea of a national biocomputation center was born.
"This marks the beginning of formal ties between NASA and Stanford to collaborate on the development of biomedical three-dimensional imaging technologies that will help change forever medical practice and the teaching of science and medicine," Ross said.
The new endeavor is essentially a center-without-walls in which scientists at Stanford and other institutions will work together to "push" the state of the art, Ross said. NASA will look for other partners from both academia and private industry to join the enterprise, she said.
"I think there are a whole multitude of possibilities for the future," said Dr. Henry McDonald, director of the NASA Ames Research Center. "From our perspective, as a research arm of NASA, we see it as very responsive to our mission to look after the health of astronauts, who may be injured in space. The work we're doing with Stanford can lead to a better diagnosis and more effective solution to the medical emergency.
"In a larger context," he continued, "we see it as being very important in terms of technology transfer. We have done all this work in visualization as a solution to physics problems, and it has a very straightforward and very rich transfer into the civilian population. It's going to lead to fairly immediate improvements in the diagnostic use of radiographic and other types of images."
At Stanford, the center already has elicited interest from researchers in several departments in the School of Medicine, as well as in the School of Engineering and the Department of Computer Science, Schendel said.
"There are many ways to use a 3-D display in medicine -- not just virtual surgery but virtual reality," Schendel said. "We're already forming closer ties with neurosurgeons who are interested in operating on the brain using this type of technique, and we are working with the radiology group, which is perfecting a technique of displaying data in 3-D."
Ross said the technology also could be applied in diagnosing and treating trauma victims, in visualizing damage to the heart and blood vessels and in treating neurological disorders, among other problems.
"We haven't begun to scratch the surface," she said. "A lot of it is going to depend on the creativity of the physicians."
In addition, the center could capitalize on the enormous computer expertise at both Stanford and NASA to encompass projects in biology, such as the Human Genome Project, that require the analysis of large amounts of data, said Holmes.
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