Monday, November 11, 2002

Hardware

Ascension gets into medical training

By Matthew French

Ascension Technology Corp., a Burlington, Vt., company that was born of an unusual combination of successes in the defense and animation worlds, has since moved into the medical imaging space and is making large strides in the field of simulation and motion tracking.

The company's latest success came earlier this month when the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) announced that it would use Ascension's motion trackers in its Virgil Chest Trauma Training Simulator System.

CIMIT is a partnership comprising Partners HealthCare System, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, MIT, and Draper Laboratory. The newest affiliate to join CIMIT is Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Virgil is a realistic mannequin that allows Army medics, and perhaps more important, soldiers without any medical training, to train in the procedures to alleviate three conditions commonly caused by chest trauma: tension pneumothorax, a collapsing lung with trapped air under pressure; hemothorax, a collapsed lung with blood in the chest cavity; and hemopneumothorax, blood and air in the chest cavity.

"Our big market had always been animation, and we started out by developing head-tracking technology for the military in cockpit simulators, said Chris Perrera, the global medical account manager for Ascension. "We then worked with Sony on 'The Getaway,' a game for the PlayStation 2. We've worked on the 'Star Wars' prequel and animated the Pillsbury Doughboy. But we began to see softening sales. Once a studio or company has motion capture or a motion tracking application, they don't really need another one, so we saw medicine as a great fit for us."

The company started by developing specialized three-dimensional fetal monitors, which allowed for the rendering of images with depth and perspective, rather than the typical grainy ultrasound images that are more typical.

"General Electric introduced our pciBird product to its high-end ultrasound machine that's designed not just for fetal, but a series of uses," Perrera said. "The pciBird can give doctors a quantitative measurement of the size of lesions, instead of leaving it to guesswork. It can give an accurate measurement as to the density of a tumor, instead of leaving it to guesswork or poking or prodding the patient."

The pciBird is a precision tracking instrument that uses magnetics to determine the "six degrees of freedom" in motion tracking: the X, Y, and Z axes, yaw, pitch and roll. In other words, the device, when plugged into a PC, can give a doctor a precise perspective of where inside the patient a tube or catheter is.

Now that it has established itself in the medical community, CIMIT chose the Vermont company to provide the motion tracking technology inside Virgil, a lifelike mannequin that will be used by the military to simulate battlefield chest injuries. The mannequin has what Perrera describes as very lifelike skin and "bones and organs" that feel like those of a live person.

A soldier or medic can practice diagnosing the specific problem and inserting a chest tube and can then see the exact path the tube took on a monitor for evaluation purposes. Correct treatment, minor errors, and fatal errors are all recorded during serial training sessions using identifier information, permitting documentation of trainee performance and assessing competence.

"Believe it or not, the Army has for years used goats for this purpose," Perrera said. "Aside from any ethical conflicts someone might have with this, goats are expensive. The Virgil system allows for the practice over and over and over. Even with a cadaver, you get a different resistance on a tube that's inserted, so the training is not fully lifelike."

Perrera said the next logical step for Virgil would be in the civilian world, where EMTs, fire and rescue personnel can get the same type of training.

Other companies are working on similar tracking technologies, but most of those require much larger and cumbersome pieces of equipment. Visualization Technology Inc. in Lawrence has developed software applications to allow doctors to track medical instruments while they are inside a patient.

"Our devices were designed for simulation but have been put into use with devices from a company in Rochester, Minn., for cranial navigation projects," Perrera said. "Our stuff has to work in order to be used in applications like that. We came from very different beginnings, but this is where we're going to make our money."