"Virtual Acupuncture" won Distinction Awards in Local, National and Asia Pacific Technological Competitions 2005

Mr. Xie Yongming, an M.Phil. student of the Department, won the First Award in the 9th Challenge Cup held at Fudan University, Shanghai. The bi-annual Challenge Cup is considered the premier national competition of extra-curricular technological projects of university students. It pools the best young innovative brains from all corners of China.

The awarded project "Virtual Acupuncture" provides an intelligent virtual environment for Chinese acupuncture training; an interactive platform for research into the clinical and therapeutic handling of diseases; and an innovative virtual human model for the study of acupuncture. The system supports multiple languages and many types of medical images, including CT, MRI and Visible Human data, as well as enabling 3-dimensional acupuncture positioning. Innovations include force feedback to simulate needle puncture, visualization of cutting planes and multi-layer dissection at each acupuncture point, and extremely high quality rendering of a huge dataset on a single PC by means of novel visualization and image data compression technologies. The project was supervised by Professor Heng Pheng Ann.

The project, which was a partnership work by Mr. Xie Yongming and Mr. Wang Guangyu, also won the Gold Award in the 7th IT Excellence Awards (Post-Secondary). The judges praised the innovation and sophistication of the project, which may be the first of its kind in the Chinese medical world. It can be used as a foundation for training medical students and facilitating other in-depth medical research.

The project is selected for participating in an international technological competition, Asia Pacific Information and Communication Technology Awards (APICTA), and become the winner of R&D category. The combination of Chinese acupuncture and anatomy promotes the integration of Chinese and Western Medicine. The prize also dignifies our leading status in advanced imaging and visualization technologies for interactive anatomy from the ultra-high resolution Chinese Visible Human Dataset in the Asia Pacific region.

	Asia Pacific Information and Communication Technology Awards (APICTA) – WINNER of R&D Category From left to right: Mr. Wang Guangyu, Ms. Wang Xinghe, Mr. Xie Yongming, Prof. Heng Pheng Ann, and the Thai Minister of ICT
	First Award of the 9th Challenge Cup (Closing Ceremony Cup in Fudan University) From left to right: Ms. Wang Xinghe, Mr. Xie Yongming, Prof. Heng Pheng Ann, Mr. Wang Guangyu
	Gold Award of the 7th IT Excellence Awards From Left to Right: Mr. Wang Guangyu, Mr. Xie Yongming, Prof. Lawrence Lau, (Head Judge of the competition), Prof. Heng Pheng Ann