Image-guidance Software Development

To augment the proton hardware at Mayo Clinic Rochester with the capability of fluoroscopy-based motion verification and monitoring, I developed computer vision application (Code name: Wukong), based on high-speed acquisition and real-time processing of flat-panel detector (FPD) data streams. Built as a fully DICOM-aware utility, this .NET/C# Windows desktop application is integrated into treatment planning workflow with Varian Eclipse Scripting API. It also provides an optional ability to store live-captured fluoroscopic frames on a HIPAA-compliant scalable storage cloud.

The development necessarily requires projective geometry calibration (see image above) of the flat-panel imagers. While the room configuration is engineered to a given specification, the actual geometry may contain small errors. This project delivers an iterative algorithmic calibration routine to correct such errors, i.e. translation, rotation and non-affine distortions. The main motivation behind this routine is to enable high-fidelity perspective overlays of RT structure sets in our in-house clinical software. It may also be used as an independent QA of vendor’s own calibrations.

Publications and talks which resulted from this project are listed below.