Voxel, Inc.
Voxel Gives Surgeons 3D X-ray View Inside the Human Body
A patient with a brain tumor lies motionless on the operating table. The surgeon must effectively remove the tumor without damaging surrounding healthy tissue. Previously, this was undertaken without the ability to capture in 3D the anatomical relationships within the patient’s body. But now, Voxel’s Mac-based Digital Holography System gives surgeons a life-size, 3D X-ray view of the patient — not to mention a dramatically improved level of confidence during high-stakes surgeries.
Each day, surgeons face the daunting task of delving into the human body — removing brain tumors, fixing traumatic spine injuries, conducting cranio-facial surgery. But until now, surgeons have not had a good way to fully visualize 3D anatomical relationships within the patient’s body. Ordinary X-rays only provide 2D representations, and technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MR) and Computed Axial Tomography (CT) provide only “slices,” each representing a 2D picture of a single plane within the body — the surgeon and radiologist are left to imagine the slices into a meaningful whole. Surgeons have long needed a 3D X-ray view of the patient, giving them a clear picture, for example, of how deeply to cut to completely remove a tumor. By providing a life-size, transparent “twin” of the patient, Voxel’s technology does just that.
“The floating-point performance of the Power Mac is ideally suited to real-time viewing of volumetric data, and with the PowerPC with Velocity Engine, it's even faster.”
— Michael Dalton, Founder and Chief Information Officer for Voxel, Inc.
Displaying volumetric images like Voxel’s requires a huge amount of processing power. It’s typically done using supercomputers, but most medical facilities could never afford their own supercomputer. That’s why Voxel Founder and Chief Information Officer Michael Dalton designed their system around Apple technologies: Apple Power Mac computers, QuickTime, QuickTime VR, OpenGL, and Mac OS X.
“If ever there was an application that requires extreme processing power, it’s volume imaging,” says Dalton. “The floating-point performance of the Power Mac is ideally suited to real-time viewing of volumetric data, and with the PowerPC with Velocity Engine, it’s even faster.”
Proven Effective
Called the Digital Holography System, Voxel’s breakthrough 3D holography and display system has been successfully tested by top surgeons at medical centers across the United States. It has a broad range of applications, from education to astrophysics, but Voxel’s primary market focus is orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, who can use the system for everything from surgical planning to more accurately visualizing surgeries while they are underway. The system has proven highly effective in diagnosing conditions that are difficult or impossible to detect with existing technology, reducing the time required to arrive at high-confidence diagnoses, and facilitating communication in referring physicians and patients — not to mention dramatically increasing surgical confidence.
Four elements make up the system: the Voxpad digital interface software running on a Power Mac computer; a Voxcam laser camera; a Voxbox holographic lightbox; and Voxfilm media. Together, these elements enable a user to produce and display Voxgrams — the world’s first true 3D medical images.
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