A better view of heart disease
A team of computer scientists, physicists, and physicians at Harvard has developed a simple yet powerful method of visualizing human arteries that may result in more accurate diagnoses of atherosclerosis and heart disease. The prototype tool, called HemoVis, creates a two-dimensional diagram of arteries that performs better than the traditional 3-D, rainbow-colored model. In a clinical setting, the tool has been shown to increase diagnostic accuracy from 39 percent to 91 percent. Presented this week at the IEEE Information Visualization Conference, the new visualization method offers insight to clinicians, imaging specialists, engineers, and others in a wide range of fields who need to explore and evaluate complex structures. “Our goal was to design a visual representation of the data that was as accurate and efficient for patient diagnosis as possible,” said lead author Michelle Borkin, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “What we found is that...