The CAVE2 System is Key to Medical Discovery
What happens when a team of neurosurgeons, university professors, architects, students and engineers stands in front of an 8-foot-high theater screen with a 320-degree, immersive, 3-D view of their data? Cutting-edge science happens, and some are astonished by what is revealed. A team of neurosurgeons from the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) recently stepped into CAVE2--a next-generation, large-scale, virtual environment--to solve a vexing problem that presented itself in the arteries of the brain of a real patient. The method they used could someday benefit hundreds of thousands of Americans who fall victim to brain aneurysms and strokes, the third leading cause of death in the United States. "We were flabbergasted," said Andreas Linninger, professor of bioengineering and lead researcher of a project that measures and models blood flow in the brains of patients with stroke. For years, Linninger and neurosurgeons had painstakingly use...
