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Posted: Mon, September 15, 2003
Nigel John: Researching medical virtual realityBy Basheera KhanComputer scientists in Wales have spent many years researching technology which has steadily revolutionised medical practices that make use of their findings. Areas of study such as volume graphics and visualisation - the process of representing abstract business or scientific data as images - have made it easier for medical researchers to work with the reams of data their investigations produce.  One such scientist is Professor Nigel John, who has recently accepted a Chair in Computing within the
Computing division of the School of Informatics at the
University of Wales Bangor. A prominent figure in the research world, Prof John is actively contributing to the field of
computer graphics, medical visualisation, virtual reality technology, and Web 3D. Prof John completed an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Bath in 1987, and stayed on to research the development of motion algorithms for 3D computer animation. That was his introduction to computer graphics and visualization, an interest that carried him into the private sector in 1990, when he became a senior analyst programmer at ICI and Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. It was while at Zeneca Pharmaceuticals that Prof John began working on the medical applications of computer graphics; he was part of the medical imaging team that developed an innovative system for the reconstruction and volume analysis of three-dimensional freehand ultrasound data. He later joined Silicon Graphics Biomedical as a business development manager and the medical visualization expert for the UK, before returning to academia when he joined the University of Manchester as the head of the Visualization Centre there. Over the next five years, he developed a research programme into medical visualization and high performance visualization.  Commenting on his decision to return to academia, Prof John says, "I
wouldn't say it was common, though I'm not unique either; probably less people would choose to return. Usually once you go out into an industrial job, you get onto a much higher pay scale than you'll
get in academic life, so making the change back into academic life certainly has financial consequences - but I enjoy being back.""You have greater flexibility and freedom to pursue your research, and just do what you're interested in, really. I get even more flexibility at Bangor to develop my own research stream, whereas at Manchester, although I had lots of flexibility, I still had other duties and other responsibilities. Now that I've come to Bangor I can really focus 100% on my major research interests." Prof John's first priority will be to assemble a research team, which will be called the High Performance Visualisation and Medical Graphics Research Group. High performance visualization is an offshoot of the science, which links in to the area of grid computing, typified by projects such as the DTI's e-Science programme. Prof John will also be speaking at the upcoming SAND 2003 conference, discussing the past, present and future of medical virtual reality. Currently and in the future, he says, there is genuine scope for commercialisation of this line of research, conducted by Dr John and other computer scientists across universities in Britain. "Already, today, you could start commercially exploiting some of the things that are going on in the field, and it's only going to increase in the next decade. There's going to be fantastic technology coming through that computer scientists can deliver to a medical person to do things like computer augmented surgery and virtual reality for training, surgical procedures and other medical procedures. "To some extent that's already started to appear today, and I've been involved in some projects doing that, but over the next few years, that's going to get cheaper and more accessible to the general practitioner, and will really take off as well - there's a lot of opportunity for commercial exploitation, I think." |
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