Student Projects

The Minimally Invasive Therapy Visualization and Robotics Lab has several student projects. We have extensive experience in tutoring students from the University of Oslo and NTNU in master-projects, but students from other universities and other countries are very welcome. The head of the group, Eigil Samset, is professor at Department of Informatics, UiO – so master students from IFI will be prioritised.

Vision

Our research vision is to create advanced software tools that can give a surgeon or radiologist “super-vision” and “super-sensing”. “Super-vision” means the ability to see beyond the surface of the body or organs to deeper structures and pathology. This is being realized in developing an advanced 3D visualization system for computer aided therapy. “Super-sensing” means to give surgeons working through small incisions, guided by images, sensorial feedback at the same level, or exceeding that of open surgery. This is being realized in developing software tools for robotic control, haptics and sensors – cross-linked with imaging.

The research team is cross-disciplinary and there are possibilities for master projects in a broad range of information and engineering disciplines. Below are some suggested projects, others can be tailored to the specific interest of students.

Please contact Eigil Samset if you are interested in any of these projects.

Tracking of flexible instruments -> bronchoscopy

Instrument tracking is the bases of many computer-aided surgery systems. Tracking the position and orientation of instruments enables them to be used as navigation instruments in 3D images. Most tracking systems assumes a rigid instrument, and a tracking probe is attached to the part of the surgical instrument being outside the body. The aim of this project is to track flexible instruments by using electromagnatic tracking. Warping of the electromagnatic field can be unwarped using a novel calibration procedure. The project will involve implementing a navigation system in C++ using a framework called SIGN and improve the tracking warping algorithm.

Novel Medical Applications with Head Mounted Display

The Interventional Center has a unique Head Mounted Display (HMD) that provides optical see-through. This allows a computer generated image to be overlayed on the surgeons normal view. In this project clinical applications that can benefit from this technology will be investigated, and demo applications will be developed. The display can be tracked by an optical tracking system. The project includes display calibration, application and and user interface development.

Advanced Electrophysiology Intervention

Cardiac arrythmias can cause reduced cardiac output and sudden death. Some patient can benefit from a procedure where tissue is ablated by catheters inserted through the groin. Ablation of tissue can electrically insulate parts of the heart, and thereby control the arrythmia. The projects builds on ongoing research to improve navigation and control, by tracking the catheters and creating a 3D view where the intra-operative and pre-operative images are combined. Novel methods for remote control of catheters will also be investigated.

Interactive computation of distance fields on the GPU

Distance fields are scalar fields representing at each point in space the minimum distance to a given set of geometric primitives. They have been increasingly used in recent years in a wide number of applications such as proximity computations, morphing, path planning, scientific visualization, etc. One of their main drawbacks is their long computation time. Recently however, several approaches have been proposed to compute distance fields at near interactive rates using graphics hardware. We have developed a GPU-based collision detection library using distance fields. The library is able to handle rigid-rigid as well as rigid-deformable object collision detection. Currently our distance field computation is implemented on the CPU. The aim of this project would be to implement a distance field computation algorithm on the GPU. This might in turn enable the collision detection library to handle deformable-deformable object interaction. The task will involve using GPU programming languages such as GLSL, getting familiar with GPGPU concepts as well as with the Coin graphics library, which is used as a framework for the collision detection library. According to the candidate interests, different related issues might also be addressed, such as implementing adaptive storage structures for distance fields on the GPU or improving the collision detection library.

RF ablation of liver tumors

Hyperthermia ablation has been widely used for treating malignant liver tumors not amenable to conventional surgical resection. Heating modalities in clinical use include laser, microwave, radiofrequency, and focused ultrasound. The exact size and shape of the resulting ablation is difficult to predict because of heterogeneous distribution of the thermal energy due to local disparity in tissue composition, tissue anatomy, and vascularization. In clinical series, local tumor progression after ablation therapy has been reported to be as high as 30% to 60%, indicating the presence of viable malignant cells at the treated site. Improved intraprocedural monitoring may reduce the local tumor progression rates associated with thermal ablation and prove beneficial in regard to long-term patient survival.

In this project the student will develop methods to visualize heat deposits using temperature sensitive MRI imaging methods and biodynamic models.