TECHNICAL PROGRESS - SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES

All activities for Maribor partners are summarised, special contributions are marked bold:

1. Acquire high-quality static Magnetic Resonance (MR) images of normal and pathological knees.
2. Acquire lower quality pseudo-dynamic MR images of normal and patient knees while undergoing exercise under light load using a custom-designed exercise rig.
3. Segment the MR images to create labelled tissue structures. In practice, this segmentation might be achieved by registration to a template.
4. Validate the image segmentation results.
5. Use the high-quality segments to generate finite element meshes of each structure in the knee.
6. Utilise the meshes in the PAM-Suite? explicit finite element software environment.
7. Validate the behaviour / performance of the fine element meshes against the in-vivo imaging acquired using the exercise rig.
8. Evaluate the utility of the SimBio software tools for clinical scenarios involving the knee joint, such as the effect of meniscal tissue removal (partial meniscectomy) and the "virtual design" of meniscal implants.
9. Validate the SimBio environment as a whole.

 

The purpose of the MR compliant exercise rig is to permit the validation of the quality of the fine element (FE) models created using the SimBio environment. The rig must allow a volunteer or patient to undertake a controlled exercise protocol while exerting known light forces and the rig must be fully MR compliant, that is, it must not utilise any metal or ferro-magnetic materials in its construction. The MR exercise rig is required for acquisition of pseudo-dynamic in-vivo MR images.

Partner SBM is reproducing MR compliant exercise rig with some minor modification according to a scheme provided by the partner USFD, while partner UNI-MB is developing optical sensor for measuring a force on a pedal of rig.

 

TECHNICAL PROGRESS - AN IST TOOL

An Image Segmentation Tool (IST) application has been designed as a MR image manipulation and analysis software. This tool is in the first place meant as a helping tool for manual segmentation/annotation of the MR images (not necessarily knee images). It enables that clinicians manually annotate (segment) every 2D slice of the MR sequence. Marked interesting regions for each 2D slice are afterwards stored as a XML document (output).

All features that are supported by the IST application are as follows:
- easy reading and writing of MR documents,
- simple navigation through the MR images,
- tool for segmentation/annotation of the MR images,
- a conversion tool from internal Toshiba MR image format into DICOM image format,
- an advanced help.

A segmentation tool, a core of IST application, has been added as utility for a verification phase inside the SimBio project, but it can be used also for other intentions. It enables to create, manipulate, delete and save contours or regions. It has advanced GUI (e.g. popup menus). Each annotation (e.g. meniscus) is represented with own colour, some descriptive text etc. There are integrated some user friendly routines like copying annotations from previous slices, importing annotations, zoom, etc.