A new tool at the Weill Cornell Medical College allows doctors to take a virtual walk through a patient's MRIs to see potential medical problems and even plan out surgeries. Technology reporter Adam Balkin filed the following report.

In the next future, patients who need brain surgery may be able to have their surgeons "walk" through a virtual representation of their brains to devise the best plan of attack, before making the first incision.

It may sound like science fiction, but such a scenario will be possible, thanks to "The Cave," a little room at the Weill Cornell Medical College in the Upper East Side that is surrounded by a whole bunch of Christie digital projectors, which are used in movie theaters.

Any magnetic resonance imaging can be loaded onto the projectors in minutes, and then doctors and researchers can wear 3-D glasses to virtually "walk" through the MRI of any organ or cell, including ones that are too small to be seen under a microscope.

"Components such as genes, molecules, cells, tissues and whole organs are presented through computational means that one can now investigate, interact with, analyze and use for planning interventions and new research and new discoveries," says Dr. Harel Weinstein of Weill Cornell Medical College.

A user's glasses are tracked, so that wherever the user looks the image moves. The motion-sensing mouse has technology inside just like a Nintendo Wii remote.

The whole system itself was originally designed for the military and oil companies, but just recently made its way into medical research.

In the roughly two years "The Cave" has been at Weill Cornell, staff say among their most gratifying moments is when a researcher who has been studying a cell or protein for 20 years uses the "Cave" and has an instant change of thought about his or her research.

"The ability to look at it as an object in space has allowed us to discover really relationships that previously we didn't know about, and also to correct incorrect assumptions that we made about relationships because we only had the two-dimensional information," says Weinstein. "Researchers who had been working on a particular problem for a very long time stepped in and were able to completely change their view about these relationships and therefore about very fundamental functions within the first few minutes."

Weill Cornell developers say they hope to soon have the MRI images transmitted straight to the user's glasses. That would enable a surgeon to plan a procedure and then have access to that plan in the operating room.