PHYSICS

Tomorrow's surgeons and clinicians will increasingly be trained in various surgical procedures using highly developed computer simulations, and many of those simulations may well be developed at the University of Wales, Bangor, UK. Virtual reality programmes already exist for a limited number of surgical and radiography procedures. Along with these powerful simulations, a newer generation of 'augmented reality' programme is now being developed. Augmented Reality creates unique and individual three-dimensional representations based on patient information from a CT scan or other source. These can assist the surgeon in planning for surgery for example, by illustrating how thing such as tumors lie inside the patients body. Bangor is set to become one of a few centres in the UK where this area of leading-edge virtual reality is being researched, developed and taught. Recently appointed Professor of Computing, Professor Nigel John, is the expert who brings this new research activity to the University. Professor John heads the new High Performance Visual and Medical Graphics Unit at the University's School of Informatics. The Unit is dedicated to developing state of the art high technology graphics for various medical, clinical and training applications. He is the former head of the Manchester Visualization Centre at the University of Manchester. "Virtual reality environments have a range of possible applications in medical imaging for both diagnostic and surgical training purposes," Professor John explains. "One of the great advantages is that we can develop simulators to model various surgical procedures exactly, enabling surgeons to practice without risk to real life patients. The great challenge for us is to construct accurate and understandable visual interpretation from vast amounts of data and to be able to create real-time visual images that the surgeons can manipulate much as they would in real-life." As a result of this new development, the university's School of Informatics is able to offer a new post graduate degree course in Advanced Visualization, Computer Animation and Virtual environments from September 2004. Students completing the course need not necessarily follow the medical applications route but will have a firm grasp of the current practices and directions in computer graphics techniques and be able to apply them to scientific visualization, virtual environments, and computer animation.