Trip to SPIE Medical Imaging 2009
Lab students Yunfeng Sui and Beibei Zhou accompanied Dr. Andrew Willis to this years SPIE Conference on Medical Imaging. They presented their work entitled "Improving Inter-fragmentary Alignment for Virtual 3D Reconstruction of Highly Fragmented Bone Fractures"
at the conference. This work is sponsored by the NIH under an R21 grant and seeks to quantify the severity of traumatic, i.e., highly fragmented, bone fractures involving many bone fragments. Such fractures often pose difficult problems for orthopeadic surgeons and have a higher instance of PTOA (Post-Traumatic Osteo-Arthritis). Our paper presented algorithms that semi-automatically aligns virtual models of bone fragments extracted from CT (computerized tomography) data. At the moment, we are validating results using surrogate bone material which can be measured accurately using a laser scanner and appears similar to human bones in CT images. Details are available in our paper.
The picture shows the three of us at the conference. Left to right: Yunfeng Sui, Dr. Andrew Willis and Beibei Zhou.