Getting a good look at a person’s guts without slashing through skin isn’t easy. Radiologists use computed tomography to capture thin-slice images of our insides, but then they have to envision how those 2-D x-rays fit together. It’s like looking at slices of bread and imagining the loaf. But help is on the way from an unlikely source: kid flicks. UCSF radiologist Richard Breiman — working with 3-D technology developed by

imaging company Fovia — was able to combine those bread slices using volume rendering. It’s roughly the same software trick that enables Pixar, the

studio behind Toy Story and most of the other blockbusters children are obsessed with.1 Breiman can assemble images that are viewable from any angle, and even manipulate the picture, gamer style — spin it around or animate it for, say, a flight through the colon. (Bet you can’t do that in Assassin’s Creed 2 .) Eventually, Breiman says, doctors might be able to just program the scans into robot surgeons and let their steady hands do the work. Paging Dr. Wall-E …

Note 1. Richard Breiman is working with 3-D technology developed by the imaging company Fovia, not Pixar as a previous version of this story suggested.