NeedleFinder

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  Projects List

Key Investigators

Andre Mastmeyer, Guillaume Pernelle, Yang Gao, Tina Kapur, Steve Pieper, Ron Kikinis

Project Description

Objective

• Improve performance and usability of NeedleFinder, see Needle Finder 2013 Video
  • Code profiling, refactoring
  • GUI and interaction simplification
    • Provide Bounding Box/Region of Interest for better visualization and constrain search space for algorithms
  • Semi-Automatic needle tip (and body) detection
  • Parameter optimization

Approach, Plan

• Improvements of the source code quality, algorithms and GUI (usability):
  • Ad-hoc python profiling concept (method tagging, logging and message boxes as code probes)
  • Improved standardized and guided workflow more usable by MDs (state machine)
    • Interaction protocol using existing tools for MD to provide bounding-box quickly
  • Incorporate SimpleITK filtering/preprocessing and a little user interaction (build mean model from small ROIs around manually segmented needle tips)
  • Look into machine learning (implement simple genetic algorithm & compare to brute-force grid search)

Progress

• Overall: 3/5
  • Tuesday started - Wednesday finished
  • Tuesday started - Wednesday finished
    • Tuesday started / Wednesday - to discuss later
  • Wednesday started - Thursday finished
  • Thursday started

References

• Validation of catheter segmentation for MR-guided gynecologic cancer brachytherapy. Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2013;16(Pt 3):380-7.
• Needle Finder 2013 User Guide
• Needle Finder 2013 Video
• Needle Finder extension documentation