Da Vinci's sketches

Da Vinci's sketches:

Da Vinci's intricate drawings transformed understanding of the human heart, a new computer model.The model has the same asymmetrical rhythm and does a real heart in the human body is the work of 3 British doctors who say the creation will improve both training and care during surgery.

The three-dimensional model easily manipulate make the cyber heart unique, said Sue Wright, an anesthesiologist at the Heart Hospital in London. "We can slice it, spin it around and look at it from any angle. We have reproduced the timing of the human heart beat to within 20 milliseconds".

The Italian master's drawings showed the heart was a muscle with 4 chambers, he noted. They also suggested that arteries could clog up over a lifetime, posing a risk to health. "At the time, da Vinci's sketches open a new understanding of cardiac structure," said Anderson, also a visiting professor at the Medical University of South Carolina.

The 3 doctors say they designed their virtual heart because they felt current 2 dimensional models were not accurate enough. These limitations make it harder to perform a complicated ultrasound scan of the heart that entails guiding a probe down through the throat to the stomach.

They also analyzed hundreds of previous models and enlisted a company known for its work on films to provide the technical know-how to translate the data."We based a lot of the model on surgical data and surgeons who have had their hands in the chest," Wright said.