3D TRICKS is one of a long stream of inventions – for X–ray, MR, and CT and PET scanners, that have emerged from the world’s largest department of medical physics, and its parent, the department of radiology. A multi–decade relationship between UW–Madison and Wisconsin businesses like GE has created a stream of medical imaging inventions that look inside the human body with increasing accuracy to diagnose tumors, heart disease, osteoporosis and countless other conditions.

For patient Wiley, the 3D TRICKS results were clear, Grist says. “We saw that the flow in the artery was backward.” After a stent was inserted to expand the subclavian artery, the fainting disappeared, and Wiley, who maintains his passion for welding, left the problem in the rear–view.

It’s fitting that Wiley benefited from the partnership. As chancellor (2001 to 2008), Wiley ardently espoused the University’s role in advanced technology, and indeed, was co–inventor of a technology used in essentially all high–speed computer chips. This spring, Wiley learned with satisfaction that the diagnostic trick that Grist had used to catch the felonious artery was invented at the School of Medicine and Public Health about 25 years ago. The inventors included Charles Mistretta of medical physics, and two professors of radiology: Frank Korosec and Thomas Grist.

3D TRICKS joins a long procession of health–giving, profitable inventions from Radiology and Medical Physics, and it elaborated on a major UW–Madison imaging advance called digital subtraction angiography. Invented in the late–1970s by Mistretta and his students, DSA makes a lucid picture of blood vessels and any abnormalities by subtracting a normal X–ray from one taken with an opaque tracer in the bloodstream.

By now, the process “has been used millions of times worldwide,” to diagnose blood–flow problems in the brain, kidney, liver and limbs, says Mistretta. “It’s now taken for granted. I don’t know if people even remember how important that was.”

DSA’s real–time images supported a wide range of procedures to correct blood vessel problems. More broadly, Mistretta says, “It was probably the major stimulus for the development of interventional radiology,” the medical specialty that uses various types of images to guide internal surgery, speeding recovery for treatment of stroke, cancer and kidney disease, among many others. “Clearly you could not do this without real–time capability to see where you were going inside the body,” says Mistretta.

The advance in digital subtraction angiography added up to cascading benefits, says David Ende, a cardiologist at UW Health. “You end up with an image of exactly what you want to see without any interference. And subtraction requires less dye, which can be toxic to the kidney, and less radiation, so it is safer for patients, while still producing a much clearer image in essentially real time. DSA was certainly a significant step in interventional radiology, and a major safety step for patients.”

3D TRICKS, like many other UW–Madison inventions, was licensed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “GE took it and disseminated it throughout the world,” Grist says.