Court Cutting, M.D.
Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery
New York University

Dr. Cutting attended medical school at the University of Chicago. This was followed by residencies in Otolaryngology (Head and Neck Surgery) at the University of Iowa and Plastic Surgery and Craniofacial Surgery at New York University.

Over the past 20 years his surgical practice has been devoted to the care of children with facial malformations. During most of this period he has been funded by the National Institutes of Health to do statistical comparisons of smoothly curving, three dimensional facial form using computer graphics. Corollary work involved the development of an optimizing surgical simulator for the correction of major craniofacial malformations. With this program in hand, quantitative specifications for three-dimensional rigid motions of skeletal fragments were provided to the surgeon. These designs could not be carried out using conventional surgical techniques. For this reason Dr. Cutting developed an intraoperative virtual reality system for the tracking and positioning of facial skeletal fragments.

In 1999, Dr. Cutting began working with the Smile Train charity to develop training tools to teach cleft lip and palate surgery to doctors in third world countries.†

† For more on this technique, please see the conversation with Dr. Cutting.

www.smiletrain.org.

Q. How did you get involved in the 3D computer graphics industry?
A. Plastic surgery has always taken an artistic approach to three dimensional sculpture. Using 3D computer graphics it became possible to make these concepts concrete and numerical.

Q. How do you use Maya software?
A. Maya has become an essential component in all modeling and animation activities in our virtual surgery laboratory.

Cleft lip and palate surgery involves complex three dimensional transpositions of tissue flaps to correct the problem. It was felt that computer graphic animation would be the best tool available to illustrate modern cleft lip and palate technique. Using scans of two children from China and software previously developed for the craniofacial work, dense models of cleft anatomy were derived.

Maya was selected to simplify and refine the models. Maya was used to produce all of the surgical animations for the project. As three dimensional surgical animation had not been done before, it was necessary to develop tools to facilitate surgical simulation which were not present in the basic Maya tool set. The Maya developers toolkit was an essential component in the success of the project. Several software plugins were developed to facilitate texturing, tissue selection, make incisions and fold back tissue in a realistic fashion. These animations have been distributed worldwide by Smile Train and can be accessed through their website at www.smiletrain.org.

Q. What projects have you worked on?
A. Smile Train virtual surgery cleft lip and palate training series.
(see www.smiletrain.org)

Q. What makes this industry so exciting to you?
A. When I began doing research with 3D computer graphics, it was done using very expensive, underpowered machines. Now this work can be widely distributed on powerful computers at a very low price.

Q. Where do you see the industry going in the next five years?
A. In my area, the next big thing will be surgical simulation (i.e. gaming) as well as the expansion of 3D animation to other areas of surgery.

Q. What words of wisdom do you have for anyone interested in entering the world of 3D computer graphics?
A. This is a wonderful time for us techies to be alive. The ravenous appetite of children for 3D games has driven the price for high performance 3Dgraphics hardware through the floor. It is now fairly easy to do pioneering work which was not possible for our forefathers. Get in there and put your flag on the moon!