Rensselaer researchers awarded major NIH grant to develop 4-D virtual patient model With a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are developing a physics-based virtual model that can simulate a patient's breathing in real time. When used in conjunction with existing 3-D models, adding the fourth dimension of time could significantly improve the accuracy and effectiveness of radiation treatment for lung and liver cancers.The key challenge in this project is to develop the algorithms that will make the virtual lungs and adjacent tissues move in real time according to realistic tissue biomechanical properties, De said.
Xu expects that the physics-based 4-D VIP-Man will eventually be used as an even more general anatomical modeling tool for the biomedical community to help patients with respiratory and cardiac diseases. At the same time, Xu will continue to work on the 3-D VIP-Man to create a "family" of virtual patients, ranging in ages and sizes, in collaboration with researchers worldwide through the Consortium of Computational Human Phantoms (http://www.virtualphantoms.org), co-founded by Xu.
The collaboration with the group in Texas came about when Xu's former student, Chengyu Shi, a clinical medical physicist, and Martin Fuss, a radiation oncologist, expressed their interests to develop better radiation treatment by accounting for lung movement. Xu contacted De, who had been using the 3-D VIP-Man to simulate tissue deformation for surgical procedures, and the idea to take 3-D VIP-Man into the fourth dimension was born.
Xu has been working on the 3-D VIP-Man since 1997 using the original Visible Human Project dataset provided by the National Library of Medicine, also funded by several grants from NIH as well as a National Science Foundation CAREER grant. The new four-year, $2 million grant is funded by the National Library of Medicine, which is part of NIH.
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