IEEE Spectrum: Visualizing Electronic Health Records With "Google-Earth for the Body"

I haven't much time to write today, but I absolutely had to let you know about this article from the January issue of IEEE Spectrum: Visualizing Electronic Health Records With "Google-Earth for the Body":

Andre Elisseeff leads a research team at IBM’s Zurich Research Lab that in September demonstrated a prototype system that will allow doctors to view their patients’ electronic health record (eHR) using three-dimensional images of the human body. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine, the system maps the information in a patient’s eHR to a 3-D image of the human body.

There's more...

(linked picture from IBM)

A doctor first clicks the computer mouse on a particular part of the image, which triggers a search of the patient’s eHR to retrieve the relevant information. The patient’s information corresponding to that part of the image is then displayed, including text entries, lab results, and medical images, such as magnetic resource imaging. The doctor can zoom in on the image to retrieve selective information or narrow the search parameters by time or other factors.

 

“The 3-D coordinates in the model are mapped to anatomical concepts, which serve as an index onto the electronic health record. This means that you can retrieve the information by just clicking on the relevant anatomical part. It’s both 3-D navigation and a 3-D indexed map,” explains Elisseeff.

Elisseeff makes clear that the mapper engine is not just a 3-D imaging system.

In addition to connecting to a patient’s eHR, the images displayed are linked to the 300 000 medical terms defined by the SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine) international standard, a copy of which the mapper engine accesses from a local database. “It is impossible for doctors to remember all these terms, and they will need some assistance in the near future. Medical standards are at least as complicated to doctors as normal medical terms are to patients,” Elisseeff notes.

This is a great example of how standards-based interoperability will ultimately lead to previously unimaginable advances in evidence-based medicine. As Elisseeff notes, biomedical and healthcare standards are very complex. It's up to the HCI community to design affordances that make that complexity as invisible as possible to the practitioner.

This is a harbinger of things to come.

Comments

[Jeff O'Connor]

I have been blogging about this since about March, 2007. Not this particular technology, but the concept of translating EMR data into an avatar of the subject.

It's nice to see that I wasn't completely off-base; I never expected a functional example so soon, though!

[EMR Saves Lives]

Yea it's pretty cool technology. It helps doctors and patients both get a better handle on diseases and care.