DBP2:Queens

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• Title: Segmentation and Registration Tools for Robotic Prostate Interventions

Team and Institute

• PI: Gabor Fichtinger, PhD
• NA-MIC Engineering Contact: Katie Hayes
• NA-MIC Algorithms Contact:

• Affiliation/Institution: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Computer Integrated Surgery

• We propose to supplant Dr. Fichtinger’s R01 grant from NAMIC DBP to transfer segmentation and deformation modeling technology from NAMIC/Brigham and adopt this technology particularly for MRI and prostate cancer biopsy and therapy. Using the NAMIC DBP funds, the Hopkins team will hire an IT-specialist who is trained in medical image processing, segmentation, and registration. This person will receive scientific advice and existing prototype code from the Brigham. At Johns Hopkins side, this person will be functioning in the software engineering core staff (director Dr Kazanzides) of the CISST ERC at the Johns Hopkins University. The person will produce professional-grade software, the functionality of which will be specified by Dr. Fichtinger. The robot system interface is now being recoded, based on VTK and ITK. The person to be hired on the NAMIC DPB funds will have to produce the desired prostate segmentation and deformation modeling technology on this platform. With the selection of VTK and ITK platform, we the door is kept open for Slicer to which renewed efforts are being directed at NAMIC and Brigham/IGT. The proposed prostate segmentation and registration tools, being based on VTK and ITK, shall be inherently compatible with Slicer Navigator, making any future conversion much easier.

• Manifold benefits exist for both NAMIC and the Brigham-Hopkins joint program in MRI-guided prostate interventions, owing to existing loops of collaborations, cross-compatibility of research (MR guided prostate interventions), and shared Slicer/VTK/ITK based software platforms. For Johns Hopkins, Dr. Fichtinger’s prostate robot R01 grant critically needs MR segmentation and deformable registration functions. The project's clinical partners are based in the intramural research program of the National Cancer Institute. Thus the proposed NAMIC DBP will tie a significant segment of extramural cancer research into a prominent intramural effort, thereby leading to a better understanding, coherency, and active collaboration between these otherwise disjoint efforts. For NAMIC the benefits are also tangible: the functions will be developed in a controlled and professional environment in the CISST ERC that has been in close collaboration with NAMIC/Brigham. The development environment used in both groups are similar, in that we both base our image processing tools on VTK, ITK and Slicer and uses many of the same development tools, including CVS, CMake, Doxygen and Dart. In short, the proposed work will be conducted on a shared platform (VTK, ITK, and Slicer) with a compatible development process, and thus the results will be directly absorbable by NAMIC.