It is sometimes useful to be able to apply binary morphological operations, such as erosions and dilations, to labelled images in a fashion that preserves the labels. This article introduces a specialised class implementing parallel methods described in beare et al [2011] that provide very fast dilations by circles and spheres of arbitary size. Comparisons with other implementations using currently available building blocks are also made.


Parallel algorithms for erosion and dilation of label images.

This paper presents code for reading contours from DICOM RT structure set files into binary labels. This is a common requirement for transferring expert manual segmentations from radiotherapy treatment planning software into external image analysis environments (such as ITK). An implementation of RT structure set importing is provided with sample data from a prostate cancer radiotherapy planning volume. This is an update to the 2009 Insight Journal paper "Importing Contours from DICOM-RT Structure Sets" which worked with ITK 3.x and a local GDCM2 install.

Updates:
Mar 2013 Now correctly handles holes within structures. Thanks to Sebastian Steger for the code fix.

Importing Contours from DICOM-RT Structure Sets with ITK4

In today’s medicine a lot of research revolves around the combination of different imaging and tracking modalities to form a new system for Image-Guided Therapy. Such systems can help to overcome shortcomings of the individual techniques or create new kinds of possible use cases. To ease the development of a hybrid modality we have created a generic, portable, lightweight, and easily extensible, client-server based framework, implemented in C++, to control the communication between multiple imaging and tracking devices. Our framework Computer Aided Medical Procedures Communication (CAMPCom), allows developers of hybrid systems to focus on the most important implementation aspects by freeing them from the more generic tasks of data serialization and exchange. The framework is openly available on http://campar.in.tum.de/Main/CAMPCom

A Lightweight and Portable Communication Framework for Multimodal Image-Guided Therapy

Deforming a 3D surface mesh while preserving its local detail is useful for editing anatomical atlases or for mesh based segmentation. This contribution introduces new classes for performing hard and soft constraints deformation in a flexible design which allows user to switch easily in between Laplacian discretization operators, area weighing and solvers. The usage of these new
classes is demonstrated on a sphere.


Laplacian Mesh Deformation

The computation of geodesic distances on a triangle mesh has many applications in geometry processing. The fast marching method provides an approximation of the true geodesic distance field. We provide VTK classes to compute geodesics on triangulated surface meshes. This includes classes for computing the geodesic distance field from a set of seeds and to compute the geodesic curve between source and destination point(s) by back-tracking along the gradient of the distance field. The fast marching toolkit (Peyre et. al.) is internally used. A variety of options are exposed to guide front propagation including the ability to specify propagation weights, constrain to a region, specify exclusion regions, and distance based termination criteria. Interpolators that plug into a contour widget, are provided to enable interactive tracing of paths on meshes.

Geodesic Computations on Surfaces

We present our work to develop a telerobotics research platform that provides complete access to all levels of control via open-source custom electronics and software. The electronics employs an FPGA to enable a centralized computation and distributed I/O architecture in which all control computations are implemented in a familiar development environment (Linux PC) and low-latency I/O is performed over an IEEE-1394a (Firewire) bus at speeds up to 400 Mbits/sec. The mechanical components of the system are provided by the Research Kit for the da Vinci System, which consists of the Master Tool Manipulators (MTMs), Patient Side Manipulators (PSMs), and stereo console of the first-generation da Vinci surgical robot. This system is currently installed, or planned for installation, at 11 research institutions, with additional installations likely in the future, thereby creating a research community around a common open-source hardware and software platform.

An Open-Source Hardware and Software Platform for Telesurgical Robotics Research

This paper is about a design policy for operation-room (OR) friendly research system, software and a software toolkit SCCToolKit for this purpose, and a few examples. Examples are image processor for endoscope, OR event detector, vision based registration of ultrasound and endoscopic images, etc. We name the design policy as Small Computations for Clinicals (SCC). A system is SCC savvy if it is 1) single purpose, 2) turn-key system without need of using mouse and keyboard, 3) small form factor PC based, and 4) cost less than $1,000 USD. SCCToolKit is OpenCV extension that could minimize the number of buffer copies from receiving image frames from operating system to render it to display buffer. It is open source under BSD license. We measured the latency of image capture to display of the endoscope image processor was between 0.13 to 0.2 second for 1920x1080 size display with chroma-key image mixing. Considering of the acceptable latency of 0.2 second, the performance was as good as commercially available, custom hardware processor that could cost over 10,000 USD, while our PC based system cost 773 USD.

Small Computings for Clinicals and SCCToolKit, OR friendly Trial Package and Software Development Kit

Hospital Information Systems (HIS) are the primary source of information in clinical routine. In most clinics and medical centers, an electronic health record (EHR) stores relevant patient information which is passed between sub-systems using the ISO standard Health Level 7 (HL7). In Radiology, the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) is used to store and transfer medical images and other image related patient data and reports. 
The paper promotes the development of dedicated patient models based on HIS information. This allows specialized and tailored models for each purpose without the need for a commonly accepted data format.

Steps towards the Integration of Model Guided Therapy Systems into the Healthcare Environment

This document describes an implementation for GPU and CPU of Young and Van Vliet's recursive Gaussian smoothing as an external module for the Insight Toolkit ITK, version 4.* www.itk.org. In the absence of an OpenCL-capable platform, the code will run the CPU implementation as an alternative to the existing Deriche recursive Gaussian smoothing filter in ITK.

GPU and CPU implementation of Young - Van Vliet's Recursive Gaussian Smoothing Filter

Image-guided interventional systems become an essential part of the modern minimally invasive surgical procedures, especially for the cardiac surgery. Transapical aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is a recently developed surgical technique to treat severe aortic valve stenosis in elderly and high-risk patients. The placement of stented aortic valve prosthesis is crucial and typically performed under live 2-D fluoroscopy guidance. To assist the placement of the prosthesis during the surgical procedure, a few image-guided TAVI systems have been developed. This work therefore presents current difficulties and challenges of these guidance systems, with consideration of future prospects.