Friday, December 17, 2010

Is Google Now Into Medicine?

Google which rules our life with access to our data through various services it provide is now into the field of Medicine. Are they planning to make it big with their internet services in the field of medicine? We don't have any answers now, but only time will tell. This application matches with my area of interest as it deals with how the power of graphics can be leveraged to improve the field of medicine. And I am one of the happiest person to see this tool live and working. But I don't think my boss will be a happy man since we were working on the exact same idea for many days.

As an initial step, Google today launched an application called Google Body Browser. Body Browser is a browser based tool for human anatomy which lets you navigate through various anatomical structures of human body. Developed using WebGL, a technology based on OpenGL for browsers, you can now have a detailed look of your body's functionality in 3D right down to the muscles, bone structures, nervous system, and even vital organs. The application starts with a fully clothed human model, and as you select various modes the details increase with transparent rendering of outer layers. There is also the labeling feature which is very important for these educational applications to tell you exact scientific names of the anatomical geometries. And how can you not have a search feature in a Google product? There is this ever friendly search bar that lets you look for anatomy you know.

Google Body Browser

To get it working you will have to enable WebGL on your browser.
For Google Chrome, download the latest stable Beta version and install it. Type "about:flags" in the address bar, search for WebGL in that page, and double-click on the "Enable" and restart your browser.
For Firefox, download version 4 Beta and install it. Type "about:config" in the address bar, search for "WebGl" in that page, and double-click "webgl.enabled_for_all_sites" to set it to true. And restart your browser.
Happy learning!

5 comments:

  1. interesting, you may also want to have a look at google health http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/health/about/

    Microsoft is also big time in to healthcare with Microsoft HealthVault

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is NEWS to me.. Will try this out.. Thanks!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sirjee -
    This is a new piece of information. I never knew about this Microsoft's involvement in medicine.

    bhavSri -
    Yeah, give it a try.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey Vee, how had you been?

    This was quite interesting! and surely, this would be useful in the medical field. and yes, kids would be curious to try to out too. And in schools, biology lessons are going to get intersting!

    tc!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Restless -
    Oh ya, that's the whole idea. To make learning a better experience. As they say, picture is worth thousand words, so is a 3D set-up worth 100 pictures since one would get a better understanding of spatial relationships.

    ReplyDelete

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