Brigham Young University professor William Barrett and graduate student Chris Armstrong have developed a software program called Live Surface, which enables physicians to instantly visualize any part of a patient's anatomy by extracting a 3-D computer image from an MRI or CT scan.

With just a few clicks of a mouse, they can capture an image of a person's heart or brain, then project that onto the patient's body before an operation.

Additionally, doctors could use the technology to make better diagnoses after visualizing a patient's organs from multiple angles, or do a better job of locating cancerous tumors.

"The main goal in developing Live Surface was to give the physician a powerful, practical tool that can be used interactively," said Barrett, explaining that existing software and techniques that give doctors a look at a patient's anatomy are either too simplistic or take too long to be of immediate use.

"A program like this has to be incredibly fast and very interactive, or else it's very frustrating," he said.

With Live Surface, technicians and physicians can isolate tricky anatomy such as soft tissue blood vessels, hearts and muscles that other techniques can't pinpoint in such detail.

"Bones are easy to see using traditional methods, but even there, the simpler techniques sometimes overestimate, underestimate, or fuse [the images of] joints, whereas Live Surface neatly and accurately separates them," Barrett said.

The program works using an algorithm, or set of mathematical rules, that tells the computer to eliminate irrelevant information in broad, coarse cuts.

"In less than half a second, it pulls the object you want out of the data," said Armstrong, who presented the computer science research behind Live Surface at the International Workshop on Volume Graphics last week in Boston.

"It's how you might envision cutting a toothpick out of a redwood tree. You'd start with a chain saw and make very big cuts at first," he said. "By the end you'd use a knife to delicately shape the toothpick. Instead of 'cuts' our program intelligently identifies shapes. As you refine more and more, that shape becomes more exact."

It shows promise for cancer patients who have tumors in hard to view areas. "We can identify, isolate and visualize tumors quickly," Barrett said.

BYU applied for a patent and its technology transfer office will license Live Surface to a company to bring it to market. BYU will get 45 percent of the revenues, Barrett will get 45 percent and the remainder will be used to cover the patent and other costs.

Contact Carey Hamilton at chamilton@sltrib.com or at 801-257-8605. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.