2012 Project Week:4DImageSlicer4

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  Projects List

Key Investigators

• BWH: Andrey Fedorov
• Isomics: Steve Pieper
• BWH: Junichi Tokuda

Objective

To discuss the architecture and work on implementing support for 4d images in Slicer4.

Our primary use case is to provide support for IO and visualization of DCE MRI, with the application specifically to prostate imaging.

Approach, Plan

Our plan is to follow on the steps of the DWI support already present in Slicer4.

We should consider the following aspects of the architecture and implementation:

• IO
  • develop a customized NRRD format that would store time stamps for the individual frames. There is no currently such format. There is similar precedent in DicomToNrrdConverter and DWI support.
  • introduce new module, similar to DicomToNrrdConverter (or an option of operation for the DicomToNrrdConverter?) to convert a DICOM study into the customized format
  • introduce new storage nodes into Slicer4 that would enable IO of the customized NRRD format
  • discuss how the 4D MRI node would be related to the existing hierarchy of the volumes in Slicer -- should DWI and 4D MRI be siblings?
• Visualization
  • anecdotally, very efficient visualization of 4D MRI studies is already possible by reading them as a DWI volume following DicomToNrrd module conversion.
  • an idea is to provide a custom GUI panel in the Volumes module. This would be similar to DWI visualization panel, but would include a field for displaying time stamps instead of b-values.

Progress

Delivery Mechanism

This work will be delivered to the NA-MIC Kit as a core functionality of 3D Slicer v.4

References