Your brain on the web

Doctors at hospitals like the Neurological Institute already have access to some tools to visualize brain scans of their patients on the web before surgery. But these tools are currently limited to 2D visualization of slices of the scans. The Web3D consortium promises to change that with the release of the X3D standard for medical imaging. This standard includes all the features needed to display and interact with DICOM images in 3D in a web browser. The functionality even including volume rendering. I attended the talk given by the consortium this morning, and I think it looks really promising. I'm under the impression that implementations of the standard are not there yet. In the afternoon, I chatted with a Google employee at the company's booth in the exhibition hall. He was showing some demos of WebGL running on Chrome (Google's web browser). He told me that the company was fully dedicated to support the format.