3D Virtual Birth Simulator

The University of East Anglia created a 3D virtual birth simulator, the simulator was created to help guide doctors and midwives through the birthing procedure of a birth with complications or unusual turns of events. The main goal is to create a "patient specific" program that will allow doctors and midwives to get an accurate representation of what might happen during the birth. The program allows the user to set the mothers body size, the baby's body size, along with the baby's location in the womb, the baby's head, torso size, and shape of the pelvis. UEA developed the program with hopes of improving the quality of the birthing procedure. A really neat feature of the program is that is uses ultrasound data to recreate a 3D model of the baby's skull as well as creating a 3D model of the mother's pelvis. This allows the doctors to look for complications such as a baby's shoulder getting stuck on the mother’s pelvis during birth. According to the official university release, "Programmers are also taking into account the force from the mother pushing during labor and are even modeling a 'virtual' midwife's hands which can interact with the baby's head." The hopes are that this program will be used to predict when a caesarean section will be needed to be performed.


This interested me first and foremost with the hopes that it will one day leak, giving me the ability to play around with it. I could make a baby with a humongous head that crushes the pelvis of the mother, I could make a mother with a huge pelvis give birth to a mouse-sized baby, and the possibilities are endless. Looking past this for the entertainment factor, it's actually really amazing and cool. The ability to simulate a birth to almost perfect representation is uncanny. Technology has gone a long way, when I first saw this article I thought that I would just be a simulator that allowed you to adjust sliders changing the size of the baby and possibly the size of the mother's pelvis, I thought it would also implement a very basics physics engine. However the fact that the program uses ultrasound data to create an almost exact replica of the baby and the mother's pelvis is mind-numbing, it's also insane how the program allows a virtual set of hands to be modeled that are able to actively interact with the baby and the mothers pelvis.