Author: Lily Jo Bertemes, Careesa Billante, Ashley Cetnar, Maximilian Stephen Meineke, Runhe Tan 👨🔬
Affiliation: The Ohio State University James Cancer Hospital, The James Cancer Center, The Ohio State University, The Ohio State University - James Cancer Hospital 🌍
Purpose: As accessibility is becoming a topic of increasing importance, we can consider how to make medical physics more accessible to those with various disabilities, including those with visual impairment. As of now, one of the largest barriers to those with low or no vision is the issue of interpreting medical images. One way to address this issue is to make the images tactile, enhancing accessibility and providing a novel way of teaching about medical images.
Methods: A method was developed for converting DICOM imaging data to a device to represent images. A mechanical device was developed which raises and lowers pins to create a topographical map of a grayscale image. The prototype consists of 16 servo motors in a 4x4 array of pins which can be mechanically raised and lowered, mounted in a 3D printed frame.
Results: The prototype system showed the feasibility of converting an image to a tactile output via the raising and lowering of pins to create a topographical display. The program stores the value of each pixel in a DICOM-format image file in a matrix. Each value is then assigned to a pin and is down scaled to the resolution of the prototype device. Each peg is programmed to 8 height positions, corresponding to 3 bits of greyscale values in the image.
Conclusion: An adaptive 3D image display was developed as a proof-of-concept creating tactile medical images. With more development, this could be performed with a full DICOM file to represent a 512x512 matrix. For 3D images, the goal would be to quickly refresh the board to represent different slices or anatomical axes. This development would be significant in making images accessible to those with low or no vision and could be a helpful educational tool.