Medicine's next frontier

Dr. Pier Cristoforo Giulianotti, a pioneer in performing surgery with robots, envisions the day when he will see a patient's MRI and discuss surgery with experts worldwide on an interactive screen inside his operating room.

"The possibility of having high-quality imaging and interactive communication on the walls is a concept that's very close to our ideal," said Giulianotti, a professor of surgery and chief of the minimally invasive, general and robotic surgery division at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

High-tech upgrades
This new technology is known as the Next Generation CAVE (NG-CAVE), featuring high-tech upgrades to UIC's CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment, introduced in 1992, where 3-D images are projected onto three walls and the floor.

Researchers aim to have a prototype by next summer and expect a fully functioning Next Generation Cave by the summer of 2012, with help from federal stimulus dollars.