UIC School of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences receives National Library of Medicine award for Next Generation Internet Project

By Staci Roberts
Web-posted: 05 November 1998

(November 5, 1998) -- A team of investigators from the Virtual Reality Med Lab from UIC's School of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences in the College of Health and Human Development Sciences, is one of 24 institutions and companies chosen to receive a High-Technology Medical Award from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for the school's Next Generation Internet (NGI) project entitled Biomedical Tele-immersion. The NLM announced that the 24 contract awards totaling $2.3 million will be awarded to medical institutions and companies to develop innovative medical projects that demonstrate the use of the capabilities of the NGI. The NGI program, announced in the fall of 1996, combines the resources of such government entities as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, NASA, and NLM.

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The NLM is funding these demonstration projects with the goal of improving our understanding of how the Next Generation Internet can affect health care, health education, and health research systems in such areas as cost, quality, usability, efficacy, and security. There is a link to more information about the NGI and telemedicine on the NLM home page at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/

"As one can transport a textbook across the current Internet, we intend to create the classroom on the Next Generation Internet."

--Dr. Jonathan Silverstein
principal investigator

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The School of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences and the Electronic Visualization Lab's award winning project, Biomedical Tele-immersion, combines teleconferencing, telepresence, and virtual reality, which enables teachers and students to interact with three-dimensional models. Tele-immersion combines several virtual reality systems with advanced network capabilities for learning especially in surgical education. NGI guarantees data privacy and security, and will allow tele-immersive environments derived from models of patient data. "Whereas the advent of multimedia applications on compact disk and the current Internet have made it possible to extend the reach of instructional materials we expect the advent of Tele-immersion to extend the reach of instruction itself. As one can transport a textbook across the current Internet, we intend to create the classroom on the Next Generation Internet," says Dr. Jonathan Silverstein, principal investigator for the project. Other team members include Ms. Mary Rasmussen (co-director of the Virtual Reality Med Lab) and Mr. Ray Evenhouse, both assistant research professors in the School of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences, and Dr. Tom DeFanti of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory in the College of Engineering.

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A list of the 24 award winning projects can be obtained at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/ngisumphase1.html

For more information on this project, contact:
Jonathan C. Silverstein MD
University of Illinois at Chicago
School of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences
1919 West Taylor Street, MC 530 AHPB
Chicago, IL   60612-7249
Voice: (312) 996-5112
E-mail: jsilver@uic.edu

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University of Illinois at Chicago - School of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences
1919 West Taylor Street - Chicago, Illinois  60612-7249. Direct questions and comments to mary@uic.edu .