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An IGT Masters course based on Slicer

Key Investigators

• Simon Drouin (ETS, Canada)
• Rafael Palomar (Oslo University Hospital / NTNU, Norway)

Presenter location: In-person

Project Description

The goal of this project is to improve the lecture and demo material for the Master’s level at ETS Montreal entitled “Surgical Technologies” (see course website here, in French).

The objective of the “Surgical Technologies” course is to familiarize students with the technologies that enable the planning and execution of minimally invasive surgical operations. These technologies combine various medical imaging acquisition techniques, precise image processing, 3D tracking of surgical tools, and several mechanisms and algorithms that allow for the alignment and visualization of this information, enabling surgeons to perform the most precise and minimally invasive operations possible for their patients.

By the end of the course, students expected to:

• Understand the operating principles and limitations of the various devices involved in surgical guidance systems;
• Understand the main algorithms used during the planning and guidance of minimally invasive operations and their limitations;
• Analyze the context and constraints of a new clinical application and propose a design based on the software and hardware components studied;
• Design and implement a simple prototype guidance system for a specific clinical application.

The practical work in the course is all based on the use of 3D Slicer.

Objective

1. Identify existing tutorials that can help students of the course learn about the Slicer features they can take advantage of in their term project
2. List existing surgical technologies that are not already covered in the class and determine whether a prototype can easily be built based on existing Slicer modules.
3. List publicly available datasets that can be used to build IGT prototypes for different types of procedures.

Approach and Plan

1. Find people who have an interest in a similar course and discuss material they already have to train people, even in other context
2. List existing tutorial and new material on this page
3. Identify a format that would enable the sharing of course material under a creative commons license (pick a licence)
4. List existing sources of publicly available medical images and their surgical application

Progress and Next Steps

1. Tamas: Shared very nice slides on coordinate transformations and how to go from one space to another that complement existing course material
2. Sara Vidal Fernandez: Provides DBS data for use in project files
3. Nazim: Indicated the Zenodo database as an interesting source of publicly available patient scans that can be used in student projects
4. Andrey Fedorov: Showed how to find relevant medical images from the IDC database
   1. Discussed the limitations of the web interface for searching
   2. Pointed to tutorials on how to use the Python interface for advanced search: IDC getting started

Illustrations

Background and References

No response