Surgeons may soon be able to practice tricky operations using a virtual scalpel on a virtual body, thanks to new 3D imaging technology.
The system is being developed by the Digital Design Studio at Glasgow School of Art.
It has used car design software to create one of the most advanced medical visualization systems in the world, BBC said.
Hi-tech glasses relay signals between the virtual body and the surgeon, who also uses special sensory gloves.
The bodies and organs have been mapped with the help of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
By inputting data from computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, students can practice virtual operations before making any incision for real.
The gloves allow them to touch and feel both the soft tissues and hard structures of the body in a fully-interactive, 3D environment, much like a digital hologram.
Professor Paul Anderson, from the Glasgow School of Art, said it offered an opportunity to do complex procedures over and over again.
He said, “As medical students are working with this technology, and as they progress their learning and their experience, we can ’turn up the dial’ and put into that scene some real-time interactive challenges.
“Things can start to go wrong, or if they do something wrong then the patient can start to respond--the health of the patient can change and students will have to react.
“So, there is an opportunity to fail here, where the patient may die, but they are failing safely and that’s interesting because that’s where some of our best learning outcomes come from.“
The system can also create larger than life images for students to get inside the human body and Prof Anderson also hopes to build a large lecture theater to teach medical students.
The imaging project came about after a meeting between Prof Anderson and David Rowley, from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
Rowley said, “Clearly surgeons need to practice and the brutal reality is that there’s nothing quite like practicing on the patient.
“Quite clearly that has got hazards and what we need to be able to do is to practice safely and in an environment which is relatively risk-free.“
The developers said that although the system started out as a 3-million-pound project, costs have now come down to about 10,000 pounds, well within the budgets of most universities and perhaps the NHS.

A comparison of PET scans demonstrates the effects of Parkinson's disease on the brain.

A glitch in the way cells clear damaged proteins could be the trigger for the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, researchers said in a finding that could lead to new treatments for the incurable condition.
The US team focused on a process called autophagy in which cells digest and recycle damaged molecules, including proteins that develop as cells grow older. This system essentially renews cells to keep them functioning properly, Sciam reported.
This mechanism is also important for nerve cells in the brain where defective proteins can kill cells and cause the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s, such as tremors, said Ana Maria Cuervo, a cell biologist who led the study.
“We have found in Parkinson’s there are problems in removing abnormal proteins,“ said Cuervo of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.
The finding could potentially lead to drugs to treat the symptoms but not cure the disease, which affects more than a million patients in the United States alone and is marked by the death of brain cells that produce dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, or message-carrying chemical, associated with movement.
Cuervo had previously shown how mutant forms of a protein called alpha-synuclein--found in a tiny percentage of Parkinson’s patients--blocked the breakdown of substances and prevented cells from clearing damaged proteins.
In the study in The Journal of Clinical Investigation on Wednesday, the team showed how in the majority of patients dopamine modifies normal proteins to act like the mutated ones to trigger tremors and other symptoms.
“What we have found is dopamine modifies alpha-synuclein that really resembles the mutation,“ Cuervo said. “That is why they have the same symptoms.“
Problems in this process have also been linked with other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease, though the specific mechanisms that cause problems in those conditions are different, she said.
Cuervo said a drug to fix the breakdown in Parkinson’s patients was years away because it would take researchers time to understand fully how the process worked.
“This is not something that is going to lead to a treatment tomorrow,“ she said. “The hope is within five years we can get companies to find a drug able to activate this system.“

New research suggests a happy heart just might be a healthier one as well.
In a study of nearly 3,000 healthy British adults, lead by Dr. Andrew Steptoe of University College London, found that those who reported upbeat moods had lower levels of cortisol--a stress hormone that, when chronically elevated, may contribute to high blood pressure, abdominal obesity and dampened immune function, among other problems, Reuters said.
In the study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, women who reported more positive emotions had lower blood levels of two proteins that indicate widespread inflammation in the body.
Chronic inflammation is believed to contribute to a range of ills over time, including heart disease and cancer.
Researchers have long noted that happier people tend to be in better health than those who are persistently stressed, hostile or pessimistic. But the reasons are still being studied.
One possibility is that happier people lead more healthful lifestyles, but not all studies have found this to be the case, explained Steptoe.
“We have therefore been searching for more direct biological links between positive states and health,“ he said.
The current findings, according to Steptoe, add to evidence that happiness and other positive emotions are “associated with biological responses that are health-protective“.
The study, published in the American Journal, included 2,873 healthy men and women between the ages of 50 and 74.
Over the course of one day, participants collected six samples of their saliva so that the researchers could measure their cortisol levels; after taking each sample, participants recorded their current mood--the extent to which they felt “happy, excited or content.“
On a separate day, the researchers measured participant’s levels of C-reactive protein and interleukin 6, two markers of inflammation in the body.
They found that men and women who reported happier moods had lower average cortisol levels over the course of the day--even when factors such as age, weight, smoking and income were taken into account.
Among women, but not men, positive emotions were also related to lower levels of C-reactive protein and interleukin 6. The reason for the sex difference is not clear, according to the researchers.
Steptoe said the findings on cortisol confirm the results of earlier, smaller studies; the results on C reactive protein and interleukin 6, however, are new.
“These findings suggest another biological process linking happiness with reduced biological vulnerability,“ he said.

In a crystal, atoms are packed in ordered, repeating patterns, with the bonds between them holding them tightly together.

Diamonds are shiny and sparkly, but their beauty may ultimately come from their unique crystal structure, one mathematician says.
Toshikazu Sunada, of Japan’s Meiji University, conducted a mathematical analysis of the crystal structure of diamond and found that it has certain special properties, especially in its symmetry, according to LiveScience.com.
In a crystal, atoms are packed in ordered, repeating patterns, with the bonds between them holding them tightly together. Crystals can be represented in models by points (representing the atoms) connected by lines, or edges in particular patterns.
Two main patterns emerge in crystals: the pattern of edges connecting the points (or of the bonds between atoms) and the pattern of a network of connected edges and vertices that repeats throughout the crystal.
Diamonds have two key properties that distinguish them from other crystals. One is called “maximal symmetry“--while other crystals can be deformed in models to make them more symmetric, diamond cannot.
Diamond also has a property similar to circles and spheres, which look the same no matter which way you rotate them. Similarly, a diamond crystal looks the same when viewed from the direction of any edge.
Sunada discovered that out of an infinite universe of mathematical crystals, only one other shares these two properties with diamond, a theoretical model Sunada calls the “K_4 crystal.“
“The K_4 crystal looks no less beautiful than the diamond crystal,“ Sunada said, adding that though it is only theoretical now, it could one day be found in nature or created.

People who were born early or just had an unusually low birth weight are more likely to be hospitalized in adolescence and young adulthood, Swedish researchers report.
Being small for gestational age (SGA)--significantly smaller than most babies born after the same number of weeks of pregnancy--was a greater risk factor for future hospitalization than preterm birth, Dr. Katarina Ekholm Selling of Linkoping University and her colleagues found, Reuters reported.
While the early-life health consequences of SGA and preterm birth have been investigated extensively, there has been less research on how these individuals fare later in life, Selling noted.
To investigate, she and her team looked at the hospitalization records between 1987 and 1996 for every person born in Sweden between 1973 and 1975, a total of 304,275 men and women.
Overall, SGA men and women were 16 percent more likely to be hospitalized than individuals who were born at a normal size, while having been born preterm increased hospitalization risk by 6 percent.
People who had been both SGA and preterm were 42 percent more likely to be hospitalized.
Hospitalizations for mental disorders, drug use, injuries and poisoning, as well as “symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions,“ poorly defined intestinal infections and genitourinary diseases, were more frequent for SGA individuals.
Those born preterm were more likely than full-term infants to be hospitalized for endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases, mental disorders and nervous system diseases, birth defects and “symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions.“
While the study was not designed to show the mechanism behind the increased risk of hospitalization for SGA and preterm individuals, Selling said, the greater likelihood of accidents, drug use and mental health problems seen with SGA suggest that “personality may be the key.“
One possibility could be that SGA individuals are more prone to risk-taking behavior, she added, but studies investigating the relationship have had conflicting results.
SGA and preterm individuals also tend to be from more disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, Selling said, and while her team attempted to use statistical techniques to control for the effect of socioeconomic status, it may still be involved in the relationship.
Nevertheless, she pointed out, “There are many other factors that are far more important in determining our health in later life than being born small for gestational age.“

Saturn’s chilly north pole boasts a hot spot of compressed air, a surprising discovery that could shed light on other planets within our own solar system and beyond, researchers said.
Scientists already knew about a hot spot at Saturn’s sunny south pole but data from the Cassini spacecraft now shows that the winter pole drenched in darkness also has a hot spot, said Nick Teanby, a planetary scientist, who worked on the study, Reuters said.
“With this Cassini mission we can also see the winter pole, which we are not able to see from Earth because of the tilt of the planet,“ said Teanby of the University of Oxford. “We didn’t expect it to have a hot spot at the north.“
The hot spot is essentially a small, narrow region hotter than the gas surrounding it, the international team reported in the journal Science.
Researchers said the southern hot spot was probably formed by the warm rays of the sun but added compressed air descending from the atmosphere best explained the newly-found hot spot on the north pole.
“We think it is due to air descending from higher in the atmosphere to lower in the atmosphere,“ Teanby said in a telephone interview. “The mass of air heats up as it’s compressed--like air in a bicycle pump.“
The researchers were able to gauge different temperatures using the Cassini spacecraft’s infrared spectrometer that measures the intensity of radiation emitted from Saturn’s atmosphere.
Cassini was launched in 1997 to examine Saturn.
Reconstructed images pinpointed the hot spot smack dab in the center of the planet’s north pole vortex, a swirling motion of high speed air traveling around the pole.
“We’ve managed to probe the top portion of the atmosphere,“ Teanby said.
The findings may also help scientists better understand other gas planets in the Earth’s solar system such as Jupiter, Teanby said.
They also help shed light on the growing number of newly-discovered planets orbiting stars other than our own. So far, there are more than 230 of these known exoplanets.
“If we can gain an understanding of what goes on in the atmosphere, we can apply them to other planets and extra solar planets now being discovered,“ Teanby said.

Alcon blue butterfly has managed to produce larvae with a chemical coating similar to that of the local Myrmica rubra ants.

Call it the cuckoo of butterflies. Like the well-known birds, the Alcon blue butterfly has found a way to get others to raise its offspring.
Researchers in Denmark report that the large blue butterfly has managed to produce larvae with a chemical coating similar to that of the local Myrmica rubra ants, AP wrote.
The butterflies deposit their larvae on marsh gentian plants where exploring ants find them, identify the chemical coating, and take the butterfly larvae back to the ant colony and feed them until they grow up and leave, the researchers said.
The researchers, led by David R. Nash of the University of Copenhagen, added that elsewhere in Europe the Alcon butterfly uses a different ant species to raise its young.
The study was led by the Center for Social Evolution at the University of Copenhagen.