MedCity News Covers ICT Work Creating Virtual Doctors with USC’s Center for Body Computing

MedCity News interviewed Dr. Leslie Saxon, director of the Center for Body Computing at the University of Southern California, about work she is doing with ICT.
“We’re developing an army of virtual doctors,” Saxon said, noting that ICT created a virtual representation of Saxon that even she admitted looks surprisingly real. (The human version is on the right in this short video.)
“I could be doing a procedure and a virtual me could be taking a history,” said Saxon, chief of cardiovascular medicine at USC Keck School of Medicine.
Patients can autonomously answer questions without feeling like they are pressuring their doctors. “I feel like we are getting better information,” Saxon said. “We don’t want patients to feel ashamed or inhibited.”
The virtual Dr. Saxon was created  by ICT’s Ari Shapiro in an extension of his 3D digital faces work.  The advancement is that the digital character took less than two days to construct, making it an economically viable option for many medical applications.