Image-Guided Interventions Tutorial using the Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit

Özgür Güler, Ziv Yaniv
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"One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty, until you try."
                                                                                                                                Sophocles

Quick Start

The starting point of this tutorial is with the basics presentation (not surprisingly found in the Presentations directory). This presentation will walk you through all of the necessary steps for using our navigation system. Once you have completed that part of the tutorial you can continue to explore the underlying concepts of image-guided navigation, as described in the advanced presentation.

Some of the exercises described in the second presentation require prior knowledge not covered in this tutorial. The requirement for each exercise are given in the power point notes (bottom pane in standard power point view) .

Introduction

Image guided navigation systems rely upon a large number of technologies. When developing or using these systems one must be aware of the limitations and assumptions of the technologies. Currently, experimentation with navigation systems is limited to select clinical sites and educational institutions. This is primarily due to the high cost of such systems. As a consequence, both medical and engineering students have traditionally been exposed to the technologies through theoretical presentations.

The notion that students are more engaged and have improved learning outcomes when learning involves active experimentation has been known for centuries (see Sophocles' quote above). More recently this educational approach was formalized by the educational theorist John Dewey, describing a theory linking between experience and education, experiential education.

We provide an infrastructure that facilitates experiential education in the domain of Image-Guided Interventions at a minimal cost. All we require are LEGO blocks to construct a phantom, mock patient, for which we provide CT scans, and a webcam which when combined with our software provides the functionality of a basic navigation system.

For a more detailed introduction and motivation see the following: For an overview of Image-Guided Interventions for engineering students we recommend reading one of the following:

Additional Data Sets

Data sets for various phantoms that can be used in the tutorial can be found here.

Video

These are videos showing how to work with our software, also linked to from the tutorial presentation.

Note that these were created with version 1.0 of the tutorial which is slightly different from the current version.