Medics and other health professionals take a lot of time gradually building up their own resistance to the sight of blood, decay and other dramatic bodily processes.
Dentists in particular sometimes need to show their patients the insides of their mouths, however. So keen are they to point out the finer points of dental surgery that they sometimes forget this disgusts patients -and may even scare them.
Seeing a super-sized, full-colour image of a mouth, even my own mouth, is something that fills me with enough horror that I usually forget to listen to the message about improved flossing technique, or whatever.
Today’s invention is a way to detune emotional response to such images. Automatic processing of the video image would be done in real time so that the pictures shown to patients would be just a sequence of normal-size diagrams. This would be achieved by using time lapse, conversion to greyscale and edge detection filters (as shown)… so that the impact of the usual sloppy, textured, bloody mess would be neutralised.
