Automated medical avatar animation for warfighter mission simulation.

Background: Virtual representations of human internal anatomy are important for military applications such as protective equipment design, injury severity prediction, thermal analysis, and physiological simulations. High-fidelity volumetric models based on imaging data are typically in static postures and difficult to use in simulations of realistic mission scenarios. This study aimed to investigate a hybrid approach to reposition medical avatars that preserves internal anatomy but allows rapid repositioning of full three-dimensional (3D) meshes.

Augmented reality visualization tool for the future of tactical combat casualty care.

The objective of this project was to identify and develop software for an augmented reality application that runs on the US Army Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) to support a medical caregiver during tactical combat casualty care scenarios. In this augmented reality tactical combat casualty care application, human anatomy of individual soldiers obtained predeployment is superimposed on the view of an injured war fighter through the IVAS. This offers insight into the anatomy of the injured war fighter to advance treatment in austere environments.

Automatic iceball segmentation with adapted shape priors for MRI-guided cryoablation.

Purpose: To develop and evaluate an automatic segmentation method that extracts the 3D configuration of the ablation zone, the iceball, from images acquired during the freezing phase of MRI-guided cryoablation.

Materials And Methods: Intraprocedural images at 63 timepoints from 13 kidney tumor cryoablation procedures were examined retrospectively. The images were obtained using a 3 Tesla wide-bore MRI scanner and axial HASTE sequence.

Fully automatic 3D segmentation of iceball for image-guided cryoablation.

The efficient extraction of the cryoablation iceball from a time series of 3D images is crucial during cryoablation to assist the interventionalist in determining the coverage of the tumor by the ablated volume. Conventional semi-automatic segmentation tools such as ITK-SNAP and 3D Slicer's Fast Marching Segmentation can attain accurate iceball segmentation in retrospective studies, however, they are not ideal for intraprocedure real time segmentation, as they require time-consuming manual operations, such as the input of fiducials and the extent of the segmented region growth. In this paper, we present an innovative approach for the segmentation of the iceball during cryoablation, that executes a fully automatic computation.

Retrospectively gated cardiac cine imaging with temporal and spatial acceleration.

Parallel imaging methods are routinely used to accelerate the image acquisition process in cardiac cine imaging. The addition of a temporal acceleration method, whereby k-space is sampled differently for different time frames, has been shown in prior work to improve image quality as compared to parallel imaging by itself. However, such temporal acceleration strategies prove difficult to combine with retrospectively gated cine imaging.