The event of the European Inventor Award 2014 is getting closer: next 7th of June, in Berlin, will take place the ceremony which is going to announce the winner of the so called “Oscar of technology”.
For our “Patents world”, we are going to propose a video developed by the EPO (European Patent Office) presenting another of the finalists, competing under the “Lifetime achievement” category: Professor Wieslaw L. Nowinski, inventor of 3D brain atlas for medical use.
Professor Nowinski is the director of the Biomedical Imaging Lab at the institute of Engineering, Biopolis, Singapore.
For over 30 years, he has been investigating the brain and its properties, getting a better understanding of the brain in order to treat deseases more effectively. His invention consists in a three-dimensional image of the anatomical structure of the brain, which makes possible analysing it for clinical practice.
Nowinski’s 3D brain atlases, named “Cerefy”, are not completely new attempts to exploring the brain; in fact, atlases of the brain have been developed since the 1950s in print. Technological progress has made it possible to construct three-dimensional visualization with additional functionality (such as structure labels), working and studying on the bases of huge amount of data and images.
“Doing medical research is the most rewarding job. I believe that our two most valuable gifts are time and brain, so I use my time to work on the brain”, says Nowinski.
- Nowinski and his team enter the data of over 1 thousands patients with brain disfunction into the software.
- The 3D brain atlas contains 3 thousand pieces.
- The 3D brain atlas or brain map is comparable to a navigation system in a car: affected area in the brain can be detected more easily with this three dimensional map.
- Within the course of 17 years they developed 33 different brain atlases currently used by numerous physicians all over the world for research and education, but also for the diagnosis and treatment of many brain disorders, such as Parkinson’s.
Polish inventor holds 32 patents (15 of them in the US) and manages 4 hi-tech medical companies in Singapore and over a thousand surgeons now work with the atlas he has developed.
If you are interested and you want to consult more information, you can access the document of the publication of the patent EP1728213 named “Method and apparatus for identifying pathology in brain images“.
