Using emerging technologies such as virtual reality and the World Wide Web to contribute to a richer understanding of the brain.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to J R Merril.
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In the past, surgical simulations have largely been created through the development of dedicated applications that require considerable programming and computer graphics skills. Advances in simulation-based surgical education have been limited by this dependence on computer graphics programming expertise. To lower barriers to the adoption of simulation-based training, we are developing tools based on Teleos, software technology that allows a wide variety of medical content developers to author surgical training simulations without programming.
With the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW), we are now on the cusp of a revolution in computer technology that will dramatically enhance medical education. An historical analogy might be Johann Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the 1400's-radically decreasing the cost, time, and expertise required to reproduce printed materials. Now, the WWW can decrease the cost of disseminating medical educational materials. When an educational module is authored for the Web, it can be placed on a computer "server" which in turn, distributes the program on the WWW to anyone with a computer and Internet access. Rapidly emerging standards are being developed to allow increasingly rich educational experiences on the Internet. With the introduction of HTML (hypertext markup language), a standardized method of placing text and graphics, as well as the connections between them, was created.
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Photographic images make an important contribution to medical education. Conventional means of display have included 35-mm projection, film, videotape, and more recently, analog videodiscs that accompany computer-based text. The availability of compact discs, with their enormous storage capacity, and of powerful central processing units now permits consideration of digital storage of visual images for display by the personal computer. The data processing required for the representation and transfer of high-quality images is forbidding, however, even with today's technology. The problem is compounded if one anticipates display of full-motion video. In this tutorial we first review the nature of analog signals and the process of capturing them in digital format. We then consider mass storage and the concept of compressing data into smaller amounts of information that can be processed and transferred by personal computers with the use of optical disc drives. A look into the future provides a vision of high-definition television-quality video in digital format.