Imagine a world where you have your own medical avatar,
a sci-fi-like profile that’s made out of your real-time health data.
After all, you can lift up your car hood and diagnose your engine, or open up a program
on your computer to see why it’s not working properly.
So, what if we could do that with our own bodies?
LARRY: When I talked to the doctor, I said, 'Look, here's a problem.
You don't really understand the three-dimensional structure of the thing you're gonna be operating on,
and I do. But I'm gonna be under anesthesia,
and I can't help you.
And you're gonna have knives inside of me.
And that's messed up.'
Dr. Larry Smarr has been studying his anatomy in such minute, extreme detail
that he recently directed his own surgery, by providing doctors with what is essentially Google Maps
for his body.
This revolutionary, interdisciplinary thinking is quickly earning Larry recognition
as the father of personalized medicine.
LARRY: 'How 'bout you come over to my virtual reality cave, and, as patient and doctor,
we will look at my full colon and decide where point A and point B is
you're gonna make the cut?'
And she says, 'Wow, that's like my 16-year-olds do with video games.'
I said, 'Yeah.
We want to take video games into the surgery suite.'
When I was a kid, I got the visible human.
And that was a plastic doll, except it was transparent, and all the organs were in there.
And you could take it apart like that.
It was only in the last ten or fifteen years that I realized that using computer graphics
and the amazing advances in imaging modalities like MRI and CAT scan, that we could put those
two together, and actually generate a transparent version of basically anybody.
Larry has been collecting 3D visualizations and time-series data on his body for almost
a decade, and amassing it all into a model of himself that can be experienced in VR.
He fondly calls this fascinating medical avatar “Transparent Larry.”
LARRY: I was tracking my colon by using MRI imaging.
Whenever I had a colonoscopy, I'd tell 'em, 'okay, well, give me the video.'
I'd spend hours watching the video inside me.
It turns out mine comes up, and then it goes, loops way down.
Quite contorted compared to what the textbook looked like.
That's different than the next person.
And that’s different from the next person.
How different?
Well, we can, through the magic of computer graphics, know that.
By sifting through his own health data, Larry was able to work with his doctor to diagnose
himself with colonic Crohn’s, a form of inflammatory bowel disease.
LARRY: The time had come to have a resection of about six to eight inches of the colon.
When it came time for Larry’s operation, he wanted to make sure his surgeon had access
to all the comprehensive information that he did, enhancing both their confidence
in the operating room.
LARRY: One thing that motivates me to do this work: I just know how terrified people are
of things like the unknown of surgery.
They don't know because they don't see inside themselves.
This was a highly trained team; A+.
So if you could remove all of the unknowns they were gonna run into
because it's you instead of somebody else, then I felt quite calm.
And I think that actually meant my body was able to heal itself much more quickly.
Larry believes the future of medicine will be to transform our 'sick-care' system
into a true, preventative 'health-care' system — by allowing you full access
to your body's data to make better-informed decisions.
But just how far away is this world of holistic digital healthcare, where we take charge of
our well-being using transparent Tamagotchi versions of ourselves?
LARRY: The combination of the technology and the kind of responsibility for themselves
that you're seeing the millennials take, that's a good sign.
If we can harness those things together, we may just get that revolution in personalized
medicine sooner than we think.
This episode was presented by the U.S. Air Force.
Learn more at airforce.com.
For more episodes of Science in the Extremes, check out this one right here.
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