About MyProcedure^™

The poor transfer of knowledge to patients with standard informed consent is well documented. Providing easy-to-use, web-accessible tools for clinicians and patients enhances the informed consent. While passive 2D animation models exist either on the internet or in the clinician's office, it has been shown that interactivity and the use of 3D virtual models facilitates the understanding of anatomic structures and relationships.

Our primary goal is to provide a detailed anatomy guide, tailored to displaying specific ailments and common procedures in Urology with an easy-to-use, interactive 3D web-based format. Using current WebGL software, we access and display our library of 3D human anatomical structures.

How the user interacts with MyProcedure always has been, and always will be one of the chief design influences of MyProcedure^™. Users are able to move and rotate models, remove layers, isolate areas of interest in finer detail, and even replace anatomy with available, diseased versions using a simple point-and-click interface. These simple controls scale to complex interactions with 3D models not seen before on the web. Users are given the option to view animations of actual procedures for specific ailments, utilizing several drop-down commands and anatomy lists. High-quality models are displayed over the internet in real-time. The user can strip layers off the model from skin to bone with an infinite number of viewpoints.

The models used and displayed by MyProcedure^™ are derived from real human MRI/CT, and built under the guidance of consulting physicians. This is a very unique feature of MyProcedure^™. Because we are able to access the assets of a large and diverse University, this project has remained completely agnostic. This allows us to offer unbiased, patient-centric information.

MyProcedure^™ is developed and maintained by the Center for Research in Education and Simulation Technologies (CREST) of the University of Minnesota Medical School's Department of Urologic Surgery. CREST is the research arm of the University of Minnesota's SimPORTAL (Simulation PeriOperative Resource for Training and Learning).

We realize that the WebGL standard is relatively new and isn't supported by every computer out there. In fact, there are several different factors ranging from your operating system (Windows, Mac, etc.) to your graphics chipset to your web browser. To assist with this issue we've built our system to smartly recognize if the user's current computer setup is not WebGL-capable. In the event that this occurs, the user is automatically redirected to an image-based version of MyProcedure^™. While this alternate version isn't capable of the interactive 3D environment that the full version of MyProcedure is, it contains all of the same useful information.