I-Corps: A Clinician's Segmentation/Registration Tool

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed project involves development of a user-interactive software suite for medical image analysis. The core algorithms consist of simultaneous segmentation and registration based on active contour and active surface models. This software is designed to deliver a practical, intuitive, and easy-to-use desktop software tool to doctors, clinicians, and other health-care professionals to extract geometric tissue features (segmentation) from collected image data (including modalities such as MRI, CT, PET, etc.) while simultaneously aligning such geometric structures across separately collected datasets (registration). Included in the software application will be tools to visualize and quantitatively measure the extracted geometric information, thereby providing heavily sought information to aid in diagnosis, treatment and surgical planning, as well as evaluation of trials and studies. Current clinical practices in medical image analysis are labor intensive and time consuming. The proposed software suite has the potential to be a powerful tool that may reduce the time from current several work days to less than an hour. If successfully developed, this tool could enable higher patient throughput and assist in extracting accurate diagnostic information from medical images. The technology finds application in cardiac function analysis, structural neuro-imaging, planning cardiac resynchronization therapy, and planning radiation therapy.