- Everything's possible in our heads.
The virtual world is really the closest
to our imagination.
The minute we go into the lab we're instantly
constrained by the machines in front of us.
Today everything can be imagined in 3D.
It's much more powerful.
Virtually every product around you
is designed on the computer.
We apply this incredible technology
to help improve all products that are around us,
except in medicine.
Your doctor is still dealing with 2D.
It's been always said, "A picture
"is worth a thousand words," and that is true in healthcare,
as much as anything.
Each field moves at a certain time,
but we believe that 3D technology is ready,
and that medicine will get the same benefits
that we've seen in every other industry,
once they embrace 3D.
My daughter was born with a congenital heart disease.
The left and right ventricles are reversed.
So she's had a pacemaker since she was two.
The biggest risk for her is
that her weaker ventricle wears out.
Typically, complications set in when she's about 30.
She's 28 now.
- Being a lifelong patient, you realize that a lot
of people don't have a lot of involvement
in their medical care.
It's a little bit different when it's like the parent
of a kid with a condition, so my dad got really involved,
and the doctors opened up to him because he's an engineer.
- As an engineer, you take things apart.
With the human body, we didn't build it,
but there's no reason why we can't understand it.
We just need a different set of tools.
We all see car crashes and we see crash dummies in them,
but they don't actually build hundreds
of different kinds of cars.
They actually build it on the computer,
and they crash it thousands of times.
What we do for a living is actually help companies
who build planes and cars to optimize the performance.
I remember thinking, "Why can't we do that
"for the medical field?"
The heart, for most of us, is a mystery.
So the living heart project, basically,
is building a realistic virtual version of the human heart.
Her case is very unique, so, as you can imagine,
there's very little data, no reliable data at all,
and I thought if we could take our technology
and build a virtual model of the human heart,
we could demonstrate that the biggest way
to improve the healthcare system we have is
to help people to manage their health better,
to give them the tools in a forum that makes sense.
What we're able to learn from the living heart project
is providing insights into decision making.
Everybody understands what the technology can do,
because they can see it, they can experience it.
Those 3D experiences are incredibly powerful.
- So, now, if I had an imaging study,
you could make a model of my heart,
and you could actually run simulations
of thousands of patients that don't actually exist.
So I could know how this will progress,
how any interventions would affect my heart.
- As her doctors tell us, by the time they see the symptoms,
it's probably too late.
So we're helping to give them the insights
of what to look for first.
See the coronary arteries and a little bit of fat.
- Ultimately I would like to be doing bench to bedside.
So, being at the interface between researchers and doctors,
kind of doing what my dad is already doing.
I think having a child with a health condition
can be really scary, and what my dad did was to take
that from being afraid of the issue
and make something out of it,
and, you know, I try to do the same thing
where instead of being afraid of going
to the doctor and worrying about the future,
I want to be that doctor.
The best thing to do is take what you're given
and be inspired by it.