Added realism for 3D heart models - Cornell University research group benefit from 3DSOM's advanced texturing technology

March 2007

A medical research group have created a very impressive 3D visualization of animal hearts using 3DSOM Pro's powerful photo-based modelling solution. The project is one of several "Faculty Innovation in Teaching" projects at Cornell University and the principal investigator is Dr. Marc Kraus. Using just digital photographs of a real horse's heart and the 3DSOM Pro software, researchers created a fully textured photo-realistic 3D model. This was combined with existing medical data to create a 3D animation of a beating heart. The work was carried out by Dr. Flavio Fenton.

"The 3D anatomical hearts are used for both research and teaching. Texturing the structures helps especially for the teaching part and for better presentation of research results..." Dr. Fenton explains, "...this was easily achieved using the very nice 3DSOM Pro software!"

Left: input photo, Centre: heart model in 3DSOM Pro, Right: 3d animated model in browser

To view the results, open the following links in a Java-enabled web browser...

• 3DSOM heart model: http://www.3dsom.com/proexamples/heart.html
• 3D animated heart: http://www.3dsom.com/rd/animatedheart.html

About the research:

Dr Fenton is a visiting scientist at Cornell University and is Director of Electrophysiology Research, Beth Israel Medical Center. The principal investigator at Cornell is Dr. Marc Kraus and the project manager is Roberta Militello. Funding and Support for the Cardio Teaching Modules provided by the Faculty Innovation in Teaching Program, Office of the Provost, Cornell University, (c) Cornell University 2007. For more information on Dr. Fenton's work on heart arrhythmia and computer simulations see http://arrhythmia.hofstra.edu.

About 3DSOM Pro

3DSOM Pro, produced by Creative Dimension Software Ltd, is a high-end tool for automatically generating 3D models from photos of an object. The object is placed on a special calibration target with a backdrop and a number of photos taken from different directions. A fully textured 3D model is created with the majority of the process being fully automatic. For more information visit www.3dsom.com.