Multi-modal Tracking of In Vivo Skeletal Structures and Implants

Rhode Island Hospital, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY The goal of the parent project is to develop an extensible, open-source software program for image-based skeletal and implant motion tracking that will compute six degree-of-freedom skeletal kinematics from biplane videoradiography (BVR), 3DCT, or 4DCT image datasets. The parent project partners teams at three academic institutions with software engineers at Kitware, Inc., an experienced and extremely capable open-source software development company, to refine and enhance Autoscoper, an existing open-source BVR software program, and integrate it into the Kitware-managed 3D Slicer ecosystem to yield SlicerAutoscoperM (SAM). In this project supplement we propose a new collaboration with research software engineers at Brown University to update and extend an existing online system designed to manage image-based zoological kinematic data – the X-ray Motion Analysis Portal (XMAPortal) – to create to create the Human Motion Analysis Portal (HMAPortal), a parallel system for managing and sharing SAM-compliant human kinematic data. The inputs for SAM consist of 10 or more files generated from 16 or more raw data and calibration files, and most of these files have associated metadata that are essential for analysis with SAM, such as video frame rate and CT voxel dimensions. It is crucial the files for SAM are organized in a standard format. This is especially important for the open sharing of human kinematic datasets among research groups, which is a major long-term goal of the parent project. When we wrote the parent proposal, we recognized that data management and sharing would present challenges, but developing those solutions was beyond the scope of our SAM software development. Updating and extending the XMAPortal to create the HMAPortal will make SAM datasets more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, i.e., compliant with FAIR principles for data management and stewardship. The proposed project supplement falls within the scope of the parent project because managing and sharing SAM data among independent lab testing sites is part of the parent project's specific Aims 2 and 3. Development of the HMAPortal will create a much-needed template for the organization of legacy and new datasets (data and metadata), storage architecture, and data access tools. The specific Aims of this supplement are to: 1) collaborate with professional software engineers at Brown University to use robust software engineering practices to re-engineer and adapt the existing XMAPortal code to create the HMAPortal, a repository for SAM human kinematic datasets; 2) create HMAPortal data upload (HMAPortalupload) and download (HMAPortaldownload) plugins to translate and standardize datasets, thereby making these and all future datasets conform to FAIR data principles: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable; and 3) engage with the research community to develop consensus on data structures for the HMAPortal, through workshops that are already planned as part of the parent project.