VistaNet

A couple weeks back I was chatting with a colleague about the VistaNet project and some the lessons learned from it. In 1989, I was looking for driving applications that could demonstrate the functionality of an emerging technology (Asynchronous Transfer Mode, ATM) coming out of the telecom industry. There was a funding opportunity that I became aware of. The NSF and DARPA were cooperating to establish a set of projects that would address the challenges associated with making networks and applications using them, to operate at the gigabit per second rate. I’d established contacts at MCNC and the UNC computer Science department. MCNC had recently acquired a Cray YMP supercomputer. UNC had an advanced graphics engine, called Pixel Planes 5. We approached UNC and MCNC about interconnecting these devices. UNC was interested and pulled in a radiation oncologist from the medical school. He wanted to improve the way radiation therapy treatment was planned for caner patients. The state of the art involved approximating the patient anatomy using an MRI slice that went through the tumor. He wanted to use 3D representations of the anatomy to do a better job of minimizing radiation exposure to the normal tissue near the tumor site. This became the vision behind our testbed proposal, called VistaNet: connecting the Cray, Pixel Planes 5 with a 2.5 Gbps link and delivering in real time, 3D images to a physician workstation of patient anatomy with radiation dose as an overlay. Change the dose parameters, rotate the anatomy, get new images in a fraction of a second. It was a lot of work, many people were involved, but over the course of 4 years we were able to bring about this vision. I was the project manager and coordinator for the effort, which ultimately came to also include BellSouth, GTE Labs, Fujitsu and NCSU. The politics and intrigue became complex. It was truly a cat herding experience. The 5 projects selected for funding received a great deal of attention. There were many publication and presentation opportunities. The press was very interested, although attention always went to the medical application and never to the technology behind the scenes. I learned a great deal about myself in this effort, and came have a great sense accomplishment. We overcame many technical and organization obstacles and ultimately in the process we enabled development of medical insights that changed the standard of treatment for radiation therapy planning. There were many times at the beginning when it seemed that the technical vision had become overburdened with organizational conflicts and that the team would fall apart. At one of these moments, I changed employers to stay with and hold together the project.