Professor Eliot H. Winer

The PhysOrg article Iowa State engineers develop 3-D software to give doctors, students a view inside the body said

Iowa State University engineers Eliot Winer and James Oliver have developed technology that converts 2-D medical scans into detailed 3-D images that can be used to plan a surgery or teach a lesson in anatomy. They worked with Thom Lobe, a pediatric surgeon based at Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines, to establish a company, BodyViz.com, to market and sell the technology.
 
James Oliver picked up an Xbox game controller, looked up to a video screen and used the device’s buttons and joystick to fly through a patient’s chest cavity for an up-close look at the bottom of the heart.
 
And there was a sight doctors had never seen before: an accurate, 3-D view inside a patient’s body accessible with a personal computer. A view doctors can shift, adjust, turn, zoom and replay at will. Software that uses real patient data from CT and MRI scans. Software doctors can use to plan a surgery or a round of radiation therapy. Software that can be used to teach physiology and anatomy. Software that puts virtual reality technology developed at Iowa State University to work helping doctors and patients, teachers and students. Software that’s now being sold by an Ames startup company, BodyViz.com.

Eliot H. Winer, Ph.D. is Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University.
 
Eliot’s areas of interest include: Internet Technology for Large-Scale Collaborative Design, Medical Imaging, Analysis, and Visualization, Multidisciplinary Design Synthesis, Computer Aided Design and Graphics, Applications in Optimal Design, Scientific Visualization, and Virtual Reality Modeling for Large-Scale Design.
 
He coauthored Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for PTSD Symptoms After a Road Accident: An Uncontrolled Case Series, A Multidimensional Visualization Interface to Aid in Trade-off Decisions During the Solution of Coupled Subsystems Under Uncertainty, Visual design steering to aid decision-making in optimal design, A Parallel Implementation of Particle Swarm Optimization Using Digital Pheromones, Three-dimensional path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles using Particle Swarm Optimization, and An Approach to Convert Vertex-Based 3D Representations to Combinatorial B-Splines for Real-Time Visual Collaboration.
 
Eliot earned his B.S. in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at The Ohio State University in 1992, his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo with the thesis “Numerical Analysis of the Rayleigh Problem for the Interior of a Torus” in 1994, and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo with the dissertation “Development of Visualization Techniques as an Aid in Multidisciplinary Design Optimization”.