Image Ingenuity

2003 was a banner year for two major scientific accomplishments

SUNY Awarded Patent for Stony Brook’s “Virtual Colonoscopy” Software
In 2003, Arie Kaufman, now a distinguished professor in the Department of Computer Science, and his research team were awarded a patent for virtual colonoscopy software, giving patients a noninvasive cancer screening alternative. The technology has helped to greatly increase colon screenings by transitioning away from the traditional colonoscopy to this much less invasive and more efficient method.

Virtual colonoscopy (also known as CT colonoscopy or CTC) is a safe, highly accurate minimally invasive CT imaging examination of the entire colon and rectum. It gives radiologists a more complete view of the large intestine, and leads to earlier and better detection of colon polyps, the precursor of colon cancer.  

Since introducing the virtual colonoscopy to the world, Kaufman has continued to advance immersive technologies in medical imaging and diagnosis using the Reality Deck TM — a 1.5 billion-pixel immersive display and the highest resolution immersive visualization facility ever built, located in the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT).

Nobel Prize Awarded for MRI Technology 
Paul Lauterbur, a chemistry professor at Stony Brook from 1963 to 1985, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 for his research that helped lead to the creation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as a way to look inside living organisms without surgery or X-ray radiation. Lauterbur published his pioneering work in producing the first nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) image in Nature in 1973. Four years later, the first human MRI scan was made.

Lauterbur’s first two-dimensional image created by using NMR was performed in the Chemistry building. The instrument on which Lauterbur performed this critical experiment was a Varian A-60 NMR spectrometer capable of detecting protons at 60 MHz. That very same instrument is in a permanent display in the lobby of the Graduate Chemistry building. The display area is open to the public.