Inside the Human Body
By Brent Rossen
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02.09.2007
Download Project - 3 MB (no source, no working files)
Video - 3 MB
The Purpose
This simulation is intended for training medical students in the use of a stethoscope. It also gives insight for pre-medical students into the locations and movement of the heart and lungs. Future versions could encoporate many more organs and be an alternative to, or pretraining for, cadaver dissection. It's less messy, and has the advantage of demonstrating working organs. This could also be used as a physical exam supplement to current Virtual Patient systems.
Setup Instructions
Print the markers from the zip file, the Kanji marker is tracking the manniquien, and the sample2 marker is tracking the stethoscope. Set up webcam on the back of a laptop and plug in headphones.
Interface Instructions
Place the stethoscope earpieces in your ears and the listener near the heart region of the patient. You will see and hear the heart pumping and lungs breathing. The system is fun to use because it is almost completely natural. Put the earbuds in your ears and use the stethoscope how you would normally.
Project Notes
The project is designed to give realistic feedback. The audio and animations are roughly aligned, but give a good proof of concept. Currently the 3d audio of the heart and lungs come from only one emitter, it would be more realistic with 4 emitters. List of future emitters: left ventricle, right ventricle, left lung, and right lung. There is no audio in the video, though the system does include it.
In future versions, the effect could be more powerful if the visuals could be displayed from the chest of the patient and the sounds were actually emmitting from the chest of the patient.
That way a normal stethoscope could be used and no laptop would be necessary.
ARToolkit is a significant limitation in the system. For real use, a much more precise tracking system would be necessary. The tracker often loses the markers or misidentifies backround objects as markers. The other option is a more controlled environment with ideal lighting and a solid background.
There were a number of issues in getting the models to display correctly. Some conflict between ARToolkit and the object loader was occurring causing no smooth shading, it could be because no matter what size the character is exported at, it always needs to be scaled up by about 1500, causing lighting to be incorrect. Since this issue was not solved, Glut primitives were used to represent the heart and lungs. A much more realistic effect could be created using Maya blendshapes and Ogre. This could not be done for the current project because getting video see through in ogre is challenging, but may be necessary for future versions.
Time Worked: ~40 hrs
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