Medical animation is a short educational film, usually based on a physiological or surgical theme, rendered using 3D computer graphics. While it may be intended for various audiences, medical animation is most commonly used as an instructional tool for medical professionals or their patients.

Due to slow processor speeds, early medical animations were limited to basic wireframe models. However, the rapid evolution in microprocessor design and computer memory has led to significantly more complex animations.

Medical animation can be viewed as a stand-alone visualization or combined with other sensory input devices such as head-mounted displays, stereoscopic glasses, haptic gloves, interactive workstations, or cave-automated virtual environments (CAVEs).

Applications

Patient Education

A growing trend among medical animation studios is the creation of clips focused on explaining surgical procedures or pharmaceutical mechanisms of action in terms simple enough for a layman to understand. Medical animations can be found on hospital websites, doctor's office workstations, online health websites, or in medical animation studios. These animations may also appear on television shows, OTT platforms, and other popular entertainment venues to educate the audience about a medical topic under discussion.

Sometimes this form of animation is used in the hospital. In this context, clips can be used to obtain fully informed consent from patients facing surgery or medical treatment. Additionally, studies have suggested that patient-educating medical animations can reduce the rate of accidental wrong-site surgery.

Medical simulation

Due to the scarcity of corpses for surgical instruction and the declining use of non-consenting animals and patients, institutes may use medical animations to teach patients anatomy and surgery. Such simulations can be viewed passively (as in the case of 3D medical animations included via CD-ROM in medical textbook packages) or through interactive controls. Stimulating hand-eye skills using haptics is another possible use of medical animation technology, stemming from replacing cadavers in surgical classrooms with task trainers and mannequins.

Creating proportionally accurate virtual bodies is often achieved using medical scans such as computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These techniques represent a time- and cost-saving move away from creating medical animations using sectioned cadavers. For example, the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project created 3D medical animations of male and female bodies by scanning corpses with computed tomography technology, after which they were frozen, shaved into one-millimetre thicknesses and recorded with high-resolution photographs.

By comparison, medical animations made using only scanned data can recreate the internal structures of living patients, often in the context of surgical planning.

Cellular and molecular animation

3d Medical Animations are often used to visualize the many microscopic processes in the human body. These may involve the interaction between organelles, DNA transcription, the molecular action of enzymes, interactions between pathogens and white blood cells, or virtually any other cellular or subcellular process.

However, this latter category can also illustrate atomic structures, which are often too minute to be clearly visualized by microscopy. Cell animation can use manually constructed models or those originating from microscopy and the subsequent creation of 3D polygonal surfaces.