Aaron Fenster

Director and Scientist
Imaging Research Laboratories,
The John P. Robarts Research Institute
Professor
Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Medical Biophysics and Engineering,

3D Ultrasound-Guided Breast Biopsy
3D Ultrasound-Guided Minimally Invasive Therapy of the Prostate
3D Ultrasound-Guided Photocoagulation
Development of 3D Vascular Ultrasound Imaging Systems

MEDICAL IMAGING IN 3-DIMENSIONS AND HIGHER

Medical Imaging provides information to clinicians enabling them to diagnose and treat disease. This information has been typically a detailed two (2-D) image of the human anatomy. These images are produced by a variety of imaging modalities, however, the most common is x-ray radiography. Just as in the early days of the past century, physicists and engineers have contributed to unprecedented advances in Medical Imaging in the last three decades. These advances have been primarily fuelled by the inclusion of increasingly advanced concepts and technology into imaging instrumentation. These have led to the development of three-dimensional imaging modalities such as CT, MRI, Ultrasound and PET. In some cases, these imaging techniques have given clinicians new information never before available as well as entirely new ways to visualize the human body and pathology. A by-product of these advances is the additional challenge of potentially providing at least an order of magnitude more images per patient to read, comprehend, and from which to extract diagnostic information. Applications of advanced technology to medicine and particularly to medical imaging are not abating but in fact accelerating, and therefore, these advances in image production and visualization will continue.

Recent advances in computer technology have made the display of medical images in 3-dimensional (3-D) format possible. In conventional imaging, the three-dimensional nature of the human anatomy is compressed onto a two-dimensional image. Therefore, ambiguities in the location of pathology occur, which may result in less-than-optimal diagnosis and surgical planning. However, the ability to view anatomy in 3-D will remove these limitations and, thus, will improve both diagnosis and treatment of disease.

In this paper, we will describe these revolutionary advances in 3-D medical imaging with particular examples of application in the diagnosis of cancer and vascular diseases and the use of advanced imaging techniques in minimally invasive surgery and therapy.