Data for the model

Hayley Reynolds (Auckland Bioengineering Institute) and Associate Professor Rod Dunbar (University of Auckland) explain how lymphoscintigraphy provides the data needed for Hayley to generate her model. This clip should be viewed with What is lymphoscintigraphy?

Transcript

HAYLEY REYNOLDS The data that I’m using is from the Sydney Melanoma Unit, so I am collaborating on my PhD project with two doctors who are over there, and they have collected data which is called lymphoscintigraphy.

DR ROD DUNBAR The lymphoscintigraphy technique is the way that the doctors can tell where the melanoma cells would have gone if they’d left the skin. The Sydney Melanoma Unit, they have the most experience in the world at this - they've done over 5,000 cases , which can tell us a lot about the patterns of drainage from the skin.

HAYLEY REYNOLDS So they have recorded in two dimensions the location of each patient’s melanoma site. So they have drawn outlines of a patient’s body and then put in an XY coordinate for where that site is. And they have also recorded in a database where their lymph node is located, or lymph nodes – sometimes there is more than one it could have spread to.

DR ROD DUNBAR But it was very very hard to see the overall patterns of drainage, because the data was very hard to represent in three dimensions, and it was very hard to aggregate all this data and visualise it.

HAYLEY REYNOLDS So from these 2D maps and their database, I've been able to map that 2D data onto a 3D model of the human skin.

Acknowledgements: TVNZ TELEVISION ARCHIVE Dr Roger Uren