DBP2:Queens

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• Title: Segmentation and Registration Tools for Robotic Prostate Interventions

Team and Institute

• PI: Gabor Fichtinger, PhD: gabor at cs.jhu.edu
• NA-MIC Engineering Contact: Katie Hayes, BWH, hayes at bwh.harvard.edu
• NA-MIC Algorithms Contact: Allen Tannenbaum, GeorgiaTech

• Affiliation/Institution: Johns Hopkins University, Engineering Research Center for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology

Research Goals

We propose to supplant Dr. Fichtinger’s R01 grant from NA-MIC DBP to transfer segmentation and deformation modeling technology from NA-MIC/Brigham and adopt this technology particularly for MRI and prostate cancer biopsy and therapy. Using the NA-MIC DBP funds, the Hopkins team will hire an IT-specialist who is trained in medical image processing, segmentation, and registration. This person will receive scientific advice and existing prototype code from the Brigham. On the Johns Hopkins side, this person will be functioning in the software engineering core staff (director Dr. Kazanzides) of the CISST ERC at the Johns Hopkins University. The person will produce professional-grade software, the functionality of which will be specified by Dr. Fichtinger. The robot system interface is now being recoded, based on VTK and ITK. The person to be hired on the NA-MIC DPB funds will have to produce the desired prostate segmentation and deformation modeling technology on this platform. With the selection of VTK and ITK platform, we the door is kept open for Slicer to which renewed efforts are being directed at NA-MIC and Brigham/IGT. The proposed prostate segmentation and registration tools, being based on VTK and ITK, shall be inherently compatible with Slicer Navigator, making any future conversion much easier.

Manifold benefits exist for both NA-MIC and the Brigham-Hopkins joint program in MRI-guided prostate interventions, owing to existing loops of collaborations, cross-compatibility of research (MR guided prostate interventions), and shared Slicer/VTK/ITK based software platforms. For Johns Hopkins, Dr. Fichtinger’s prostate robot R01 grant critically needs MR segmentation and deformable registration functions. The project's clinical partners are based in the intramural research program of the National Cancer Institute. Thus the proposed NA-MIC DBP will tie a significant segment of extramural cancer research into a prominent intramural effort, thereby leading to a better understanding, coherency, and active collaboration between these otherwise disjoint efforts. For NA-MIC the benefits are also tangible: the functions will be developed in a controlled and professional environment in the CISST ERC that has been in close collaboration with NA-MIC/Brigham. The development environment used in both groups are similar, in that we both base our image processing tools on VTK, ITK and Slicer and uses many of the same development tools, including CVS, CMake, Doxygen and Dart. In short, the proposed work will be conducted on a shared platform (VTK, ITK, and Slicer) with a compatible development process, and thus the results will be directly absorbable by NA-MIC.