Video games that simulate the experiences of combat, space travel and car theft have achieved a startling level of fluidity and detail in recent years to create increasingly realistic virtual worlds. When it comes to medicine, however, the graphics that doctors and surgeons have to work with are closer to the grainy, cartoonish images of the Atari generation than they are to the video games Assassin's Creed or Grand Theft Auto.

The computing power required to render virtually realistic organs and soft tissue is still unavailable to most physicians (except for a handful with access to supercomputers), but it's coming, says Joseph Teran, an assistant mathematics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Within five years doctors will be able to simulate organs, soft tissue, and skeletal structure