Kevin Montgomery, PhD

Background      »Web Site

Kevin Montgomery is the Technical Director of the National Biocomputation Center at Stanford University. This Center is a joint NASA-Stanford Center for applying the latest technologies in computation, visualization, and simulation in medicine and surgery. Before joining Stanford, he led teams at the NASA Ames Research Center to develop systems for 3D reconstruction and visualization of biomedical imaging data and at the Hewlett-Packard Company on networking protocol design and implementation.

He earned his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of California. He regularly serves on several study/review sections for NIH, NSF, and other granting agencies, as well as advises and consults with several small, high-tech companies in the Silicon Valley.

Research Interests

Dr. Montgomery led the surgical simulator and networked haptics portion of the Phase II Next Generation Network research project. He and his students have developed the first collaborative, multiuser, networked surgical simulator and demonstrated that networked haptic devices can be a reality. To accomplish this goal, fundamental research in moderating network latency under wide area configurations was demonstrated. Finally, this system also provides for distributed rendering over the Internet. In this way, a surgical procedure can be viewed in stereo by multiple participants anywhere in the world for surgical education purposes.

In addition, Dr Montgomery's team also produced a system for wireless physiological monitoring and display. This system allows physiological sensors to be plugged into small PDA devices (suchs as the HP/Compaq iPaq) and transmit their data over any wireless medium (802.11, bluetooth, cellular, CDPD, Inmarsat, etc) to a central server, where multiple viewers can view the data live in real-time anywhere in the world. Besides purely physiological data (such as ECG, respiration, blood pressure, oxymetry, etc), they have also integrated environmental sensors (air and water quality), clinical devices (microscopes, ultrasounds devices) and even GPS and live video devices. This flexible framework is currently being used for several NASA, military, and commercial applications.

Project Role

Dr Montgomery serves as the technical lead on the Surgical Simulator application. He also provides technical support and coordination assistance to all other facets of the project.