Armed with a state-of-the-art helmet, Col. (Dr.) Ernest Lockrow, director of the Telerobotics and Minimally Invasive Surgery Center, used the 3-D capabilities to perform a hysterectomy.

This procedure is normally performed with a 2D display, which makes it hard for the surgeon to judge depth. While practicing, they make a lot of mistakes until they get used to the lack of depth perception.

Lockrow said. “When you’re used to operating in two dimensions and then you go to three dimensions, it just makes it so much easier. We actually had a fellow who has not done a lot of laparoscopic surgery and was able to easily grasp the laparoscopic procedure in three dimensions.”

Although transmitting images over todays network involves latency, that will change in the future as very high bandwidth becomes available.

Although there are issues associated with transmitting images across a network in terms of signal delay, it could be possible someday to have a doctor use a 3-D helmet in Germany to assist a doctor here who also is wearing the helmet, and vice versa, Lockrow said.

“In military aspects, that’s really where we want to go; it’s just a long road to get there,” he added.

Sounds like the words of a man who thinks linearly.

If the current trend for exponential bandwidth growth continues then it might not be such a long road after all!

WOW!

Yet another story of how science fiction is turning into reality as we speak.

The National Science Foundation wants the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Central Florida to re-create a real human being in digital form, called an avatar. They will use a top NSF official as their subject. A graduate student will follow him around for at least three months and gather information about the man. Others will work on animation and high-end graphics to render the man in 3D form. And others will work on the interaction of the avatar, to make him act as naturally as you or I.

From the UIC website:

“The goal is to combine artificial intelligence with the latest advanced graphics and video game-type technology to enable us to create historical archives of people beyond what can be achieved using traditional technologies such as text, audio and video footage,” said Jason Leigh, associate professor of computer science and director of UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory. Leigh is UIC’s lead principal investigator.

Basically, this is the beginning of actually modelling a real human being, and their intelligence, in digital form. We’ve seen three-dimensional mock-ups of people on sports video games for years now, but now they are trying to recreate their intelligence as well.

They should be able to get the interaction down well, as voice recognition has come a LONG way recently. I myself just signed up with jott.com yesterday. Jott.com allows me to call up their computer on my cell phone, give the name of a contact, and then speak a message for them. That voice message is then converted into text and sent to their email. I can use it to send quick notes to my own email inbox too – in text form of course. I found if you speak slowly and clearly enough it does a pretty good job. And in case you were wolfing down a Big Mac when you recorded the message, they provide a link to retrieve the audio voice message in full.

That’s not the only reason. Pretty soon, we will all have the ability to speak to anyone in the world as translation programs grow more complex and the computing power becomes sufficiently inexpensive. Which, time has told, will happen, and will happen at an exponential rate.

The knowledge they attain over the next three years during this project will be used on the next generation of hardware and software to create even more life-like digital forms of people, which will then be used as the building block of the next generation.

The rapid expansion of computing power will increase exponentially over the next few decades due to advances in nanotechnology and you will soon see very life-like robots and digital avatars emerge. Maybe even holograms. (The UIC make mention of Star Trek in their press release)

As we continue the exponential pace of reverse-engineering the human body, it becomes more possible (and plausible) that a human-machine merger could take place at some point in the future. It may also be possible to replicate human consciousness in machine form. For all we know, consciousness is a really simple attribute that could easily be embedded in machine substrate! Every day, more is learned and there is no end to the advancement of science in sight.

It just seems very logical to me that an animal who asks questions of eternity and solves abstract problems would only want to completely deconstruct itself. Especially when there is an economic imperative to do so. We are the most complex hunks of matter in the known universe. And let’s face it, we are bent on understanding how everything works because we can’t stand not knowing ‘why?’

Maybe “The Meaning of Life” is to find out, exactly, how life works! What then? What might happen when there is no question about what consiousness is, and it can be explained in a textbook? When the seat of the soul is found? What then? These questions can now be asked! Because every day and every year we are getting closer to the answer whether you like it or not.

You can catch the UIC news release here>>>

Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine

PneuStep: MRI-SAFE MOTOR MAKES ROBOTIC BIOPSIES POSSIBLE
–Johns Hopkins Medicine engineers announce plastic, air- and light-driven device more precise than human hand

Engineers at the Johns Hopkins Urology Robotics Lab report the invention of a motor without metal or electricity that can safely power remote-controlled robotic medical devices used for cancer biopsies and therapies guided by magnetic resonance imaging. The motor that drives the devices can be so precisely controlled by computer that movements are steadier and more precise than a human hand.

“Lots of biopsies on organs such as the prostate are currently performed blind because the tumors are typically invisible to the imaging tools commonly used,” says Dan Stoianovici, Ph.D., an associate professor of urology at Johns Hopkins and director of the robotics lab. “Our new MRI-safe motor and robot can target the tumors. This should increase accuracy in locating and collecting tissue samples, reduce diagnostic errors and also improve therapy.”

A description of the new motor, made entirely out of plastics, ceramics and rubber, and driven by light and air, was published in the February issue of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechanotronics.

The challenge for his engineering team was to overcome MRI’s dependence on strong magnetic interference. Metals are unsafe in MRIs because the machine relies on a strong magnet, and electric currents distort MR images, says Stoianovici. The team used six of the motors to power the first-ever MRI-compatible robot to access the prostate gland. The robot currently is undergoing preclinical testing.

“Prostate cancer is tricky because it only can be seen under MRI, and in early stages it can be quite small and easy to miss,” says Stoianovici.

The new Johns Hopkins motor, dubbed PneuStep, consists of three pistons connected to a series of gears. The gears are turned by air flow, which is in turn controlled by a computer located in a room adjacent to the MRI machine. “We’re able to achieve precise and smooth motion of the motor as fine as 50 micrometers, finer than a human hair,” says Stoianovici.

The robot goes alongside the patient in the MRI scanner and is controlled remotely by observing the images on the MR. The motor is rigged with fiber optics, which feeds information back to the computer in real time, allowing for both guidance and readjustment.

“The robot moves slowly but precisely, and our experiments show that the needle always comes within a millimeter of the target,” says Stoianovici. This type of precision control will allow physicians to use instruments in ways that currently are not possible, he says.

“This remarkable robot has a lot of promise – the wave of the future is image-guided surgery to better target, diagnose and treat cancers with minimally invasive techniques,” says Li-Ming Su, M.D., an associate professor of urology and director of laparoscopic and robotic urologic surgery at the Brady Urological Institute at Hopkins.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and a grant from the Johns Hopkins Medicine Alliance for Science and Technology Development Industry Committee. Current experiments with the robot are supported by the Patrick C. Walsh Foundation.

Authors on the paper are Stoianovici, Alexandru Patriciu, Doru Petrisor, Dumitru Mazilu, and Louis Kavoussi, all of Hopkins.

Now you’re able to geo-tag your photos with flickr. Pretty soon, all digital cameras will be equipped with GPS and all photos will include geospatial signature just as photos now contain the date and time.

Everyday, more and more information is added to services such as Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft’s Live Maps. The saturation of information available on these and other services sure to debut in the future will only continue to grow. If this follows other trends in IT, then this will happen at an exponential rate. And it’s not entirely speculative to think so. Right now technologies such as GPS and RFID, and very soon various nanotechnologies will only help to ensure an exponential trend.

It may even be possible to release mass quantities of nano-dust into the air to precisely track wind and weather, ocean current, or to even build a real-time updated digitized model of the entire earth. Essentially, this is leading toward a time very soon when anything and EVERYTHING can and will be tracked.

I believe there is nothing to stop it. The desire for ever-greater power and control creates a market for it and will ensure that this technology is developed and implemented. Another “terrorist” attack would be more than enough to gain the support for this use of technology to completely erode the last thread of our freedoms. The world of the Singularity could be a very scary place indeed.

What do you think? As always I invite any and all constructive comments and opinions!

Considering the historic news that the Singularity has entered the U.S. governments consciousness in the Joint Economic Commission’s paper titled “Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think” CRN’s Responsible Nanotech weblog is today’s featured weblog.

Thank you Michael Anissimov of Accelerating Future for bringing this to my attention. As I mentioned before, I love looking at where we exist within the orders of magnitude. It’s a great place to be ain’t it?

Well, if you want to see something cool then check it out here>>>>>>>>>>>