John Lucas' Blog

It's official. Your parents were wrong. Videogames ARE good for you. And no this is not another heartwarming Wii story either. Turns out the XBox 360 is seriously Heartcore! No, that's not a typo. Presenting Heartworks, the first full-functioning interactive virtual heart model. And now this highly regarded program can be run on Microsoft's XBox 360 thanks to the 360's specialized processor chips.

There's much more detail to come. Take a listen...

About 2 years ago, The Heart Hospital of London, England sought the expertise of Glassworks, an award-winning chance-taking computer graphics company out of London's Soho area, to create a realistic, anatomically correct, real-time, virtual heart simulator. This simulator was to be designed to have the user orient the model in any fashion and make any number of planed slices through it to demonstrate and relate the internal and external structures of the heart. The purpose of this program is to aid scientists in performing complex heart research. Started out of a chance meeting at a dinner party, the project made its debut this past May.

Where the XBox 360 comes in is using its processors to replace supercomputers or a network of PCs to calculate millions of mathematical equations relating to the proteins, cells, and tissues of the heart. This time-consuming and costly process is sidestepped by the 360's processor power delivering the same results 5 times faster and 10 times cheaper according to a recent study from the August edition of the Journal of Computational Biology and Chemistry.

Dr. Simon Scarle, Senior Programmer of Engineering at the University of Warwick in England, researched and devised use of XBox 360's run of Heartworks by modifying Xenos, the 360's graphics processor unit (GPU), to produce data tracking electrical signals that travel in the heart instead of simply producing graphical output. Following how these signals move around damaged cardiac cells helps doctors identify heart defects and conditions like arrhythmia, a disruption in the usual rhythm of the heart that causes it to pump blood less effectively (though this program has difficulty assessing certain types of arrhythmia).

Hear Dr. Scarle discuss the merits of videogame consoles in research such as this:

"These game consoles aren't just glorified toys. [They] are pieces of very powerful computing hardware. I can see this ... being most useful for students and early-career scientists to just quickly and cheaply grab that extra bit of computing power they otherwise wouldn't be able to get."

Dr. Scarle's background reveals how he discovered this novel use of the XBox 360. He was once a software engineer at Rare, Ltd., the influential U.K.-founded developer known for its work on Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, and Viva Piñata. There he created a videogame demo, a "little shooter game" he calls it, where the player guns down enemies in an arena resembling a heart. This work he did 2 years ago at the Microsoft-owned developer inspired his research and use of the videogame console to run this program. His earlier background conducting research on electrocardio-dynamics at the University of Sheffield of Sheffield, England had a hand to play in this as well.

More Dr. Scarle:

"I did a game-ified version of my old cardiac code. I could actually present some 'proper' science [based on] the cool things us game developers do."

So add XBox 360 to the list of game systems used for advances in the scientific and medical fields. Wii's work with physical rehabilitation have been well noted and the PlayStation 3's Folding@Home application for studying proteins and molecules and other uses for PS3 creating black hole collision simulations are impressive. Videogaming is indeed an important medium that has value far beyond entertainment. Tell your parents.

Gratitude to TIME and Vizworld.