This app allows clinicians or other health care professionals to program Deep Brain Stimulation devices for movement disorders (i.e. Parkinson’s disease, PD). This can treat patients at the patient’s local clinic instead of requiring travel to an academic medical center.

In this project, we leverage enhanced networking technologies to pursue a public sector application in healthcare. We use patient-specific models on iPads running IV3Dm to manage PD DBS patients in rural areas of Utah. First, we integrate remote volume rendering into IV3Dm in order to provide the flexibility necessary to manage DBS patients with a wide range of possible stimulation settings. Second, we utilize the Utah Telehealth Network (UTN) to provide high-bandwidth connections between the University of Utah and several clinics in rural Utah. Utah is an excellent model for our approach because it has one major city (Salt Lake City) with a DBS center, but many patients travel from rural areas for neurological care. We demonstrated we are able to be able combine IV3Dm with the bandwidth of the UTN to show the feasibility and utility of remote management of DBS patients. Specifically, we believe that patients who are managed
remotely will have comparable therapeutic improvement from DBS, but with improved quality of life and a much lower burden (i.e. reduced travel time for medical care).

Acknowledgments: National Science Foundation, US Ignite

Team Information: ImageVis3D Mobile, Dr. Christopher Butson
[email protected]
(801) 587-3711