ChangeTracker

Overview

THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION -- CHECK BACK OFTEN!

ChangeTracker is a 3D Slicer GUI module for monitoring slowly evolving tumors. This page will host the relevant information about ChangeTracker.

What's New

• Jan 25, 2009, use of 3d box widget with tumor volume rendering for ROI selection
• Jan 12, 2009, New visualization features integrated
• Jan 4-9, 2009, ChangeTracker project on NA-MIC AHM/Programming Week at Salt Lake City. See summary and results here
• Dec 27, 2008, DiameterEstimator tool is available for automatic estimation of tumor diameter from the binary image

User information / Tutorials

• Detecting subtle change in pathology: slides, data
• ChangeTracker module documentation page on Slicer Wiki here

Bugs / Known issues

• during "Analysis type step", Slicer crashes if "Analyze" button is hit more than once
• registration of a new volume node with the scene results in update of the slice views: Resolved: this appeared to be due to a lacking functionality in SliceCompositeNode, which invoked PropagateVolumeUpdate() on image load. This functionality can now be controlled via the DoPropagatVolumeUpdate in SliceComposite MRML node
• incorrect setting of the registration parameters results in registration producing empty volume, no error messages from the module: Resolved: committed a fix to CommandLineModuleLogic to update the module node status correctly to indicate the error, if module entry point returns non-zero. TODO: update ChangeTracker logic to account for this change
• need to investigate reproducibility of registration and impact of the random seed initialization: Linear registration updated with metric seed reinitialization
• investigate reasons for segfault with the weird dataset from Yanling: Resolved (?): data is intrinsically very difficult to align. Registration must be solved prior to using ChangeTrcker
• check and clean up file output procedures (..-TG directories)

Feature requests/Features under development

• multi-color volume rendering for tumor growth results: DONE
• use Compare view: DONE
• 3d box widget for ROI selection DONE
• analysis of multiple time points
• testing IN PROGRESS
• improved tumor segmentation to exclude prominent non-tumor regions (vessels, scull, falx)
• Jean-Jacques Lemaire: would be nice to combine growth results with the 3D rendering of the estimated tumor volume
• Jean-Jacques Lemaire: improve user interface for tumor boundary identification -- something missing in the existing tools; would like to see better robustness of segmentation
• Ron wish list: get user input for inside/outside locations of points for tracked structure, use this for threshold selection and initial segmentation; ROI centering; sync ROI scales colors with the 3d box colors; review naming conventions for intermediate volumes; allow for separate show/hide functionality for 3d box and volume rendering; link compare views; support scene snapshots; fix bottom layout panel random popup issue
• graceful error handling

Use cases

• Meningioma growth analysis
• Longitudinal lesion analysis for Lupus DBP

People

• Ron Kikinis
• Kilian Pohl
• Andriy Fedorov

Publications

1. E.Konukoglu, W.M.Wells, S.Novellas, N.Ayache, R.Kikinis, P.M.Black, K.M.Pohl. Monitoring Slowly Evolving Tumors. Proc. of 5th IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro 2008, pp.812-815 link

Contact

Please contact Andriy Fedorov for further information.