True Three Dimensional Display For Medical Telepresence

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this Phase I SBIR project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a high-resolution truly three-dimensional (3D) color display for use in Medical data display applications. Such a display would tremendously improve remote (telepresence) medical teaching, diagnosis, and viewing of three-dimensional kinds of medical data (CT scans, MRI scans, PET scans, acoustic scans,...). The display would use broadband ("white light", not laser) illumination so that there are no questions about eye-safety of the device. While there are presently pseudo-3D displays (generally stereoscopic, or projection of one plane at a time on to a volume display, or requiring goggles) and at least one display that projects laser light onto a globe, none of these recreates the true three-dimensional light wave at the eye. These displays therefore all suffer from various problems, and are generally clumsy and not very satisfactory in use. The proposed research has the goal of producing a compact, cost-effective, 3D display projector. The state of the art in electro-optic components, illumination sources, and computational speed has advanced to the point that with high probability (but also with high risk) it is feasible to create a truly three dimensional (holographic) display that can be used to project three-dimensional medical images for medical teaching, assisting less-skilled personnel in medical diagnosis, and sharing of three-dimensional medical data over the internet between medical experts in the same or different fields. This Phase I SBIR project will investigate both the hardware and computational feasibility of creating this holographic display with available (though state of the art) electro-optic components and computational resources. The expected outcome is demonstration of feasibility of the 3D display, along with a conceptual display design for use in actual design and construction of a prototype 3D display in Phase II of the project. Though highly risky, success in this endeavor will be a terrific win for medical telepresence and 3D data display applications.