UCLA mathematician works to make virtual surgery...(ing factor is the complexity of the geom...),Health

The technology will be especially helpful with new kinds of surgeries, he said.

"A virtual surgery cannot be a cartoon," said Teran, who works with a surgeon. "It has to be biologically accurate. A virtual double needs to be really you."

Teran is organizing a virtual surgery workshop that will take place at UCLA from Jan. 7 to 11 as part of UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. For information, visit www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/vs2008/vs2008_poster.pdf.

Making virtual surgery a reality will require solving mathematical equations, as well as making progress in computational geometry and computer science. An applied mathematician, Teran works in these fields; he develops algorithms to solve equations. Advances by Teran and other scientists in computational geometry, partial differential equations and large-scale computing are accelerating virtual surgery.

How human tissue responds to a surgeon, Teran said, is based on partial differential equations. Teran solves on a computer the mathematical equations that govern physical phenomena relevant to everyday life. He has studied the biomechanical simulation of soft tissues.

"Most of the behavior of everyday life can be described with mathematical equations," he said. "It's very difficult to reproduce natural phenomena without math."

Tissue, muscle and skin are elastic and behave like a spring, Teran said. Their behavior can be accounted for by a classical mathematical theory.

Progress in his field is already rapid, Teran said, noting that "things in geometry that used to take days and days start to take hours and minutes."

Teran believes medical schools will increasingly trai
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