2013 Summer Project Week:Open source electromagnetic trackers using OpenIGTLink
Stylized image of three orthogonal coils used in 6-DOF electromagnetic tracker sensor
Handmade assembly of three solenoidal coils; each solenoid is 11 millimeters long
Key Investigators
- Retired: Peter Traneus Anderson
- BWH: Tina Kapur, Sonia Pujol
Objectives
The primary goal of this open-source electromagnetic tracker project is to teach and develop open-source electromagnetic trackers, to enable extending performance in directions that existing proprietary trackers do not address.
The physics of electromagnetic trackers only just works. Tracker designers are continually struggling to get enough signal/noise from a small-enough sensor at a large-enough distance for a particular application. Magnetic-field distortion adds to the challenges.
Low-cost high-speed floating-point computation enables use of compute-intensive modeling and tracking algorithms which give improved accuracy.
Approach, Plan
Pete expects to bring last year's hand-built tracker again this year. Pete is partway through developing a USB-based tracker printed-circuit board set, to be demonstrated next year.
Pete's plan for the project week, is to use Slicer to visualize tracker errors versus position.
Progress
Pete successfully imaged the logarithm of goodness-of-fit into a NRRD file, and imported that file into Slicer 3. Example image is above. Pete's computer has 32-bit Ubuntu, so 64-bit Slicer 4 won't run.
Next: Figure out meaning of the image.
Delivery Mechanism
References
Pete's published work to date is on Open Source Electromagnetic Trackers and on [http://home.comcast.net/~traneus].
