This is a first “guest” posting here at Charl’s medvis-Blog.We here in Magdeburg hope to provide some more interesting content from our medical visualization research here in the future

Konrad Mühler defended his Phd thesis

With an excellent presentation Konrad nicely rounded up his Phd thesis on computer-assisted surgery. Konrad developed and refined techniques for animation, viewpoint determination and annotation of 2d slices and 3d models thus supporting the use of 3d models for surgical education and training. Together with Christian Tietjen he integrated his development in the METK – an efficient extension to Mevislab which supports the fast development of surgical applications. A major achievement of his work was the concept and realization of the LiverSurgeryTrainer – a system which directly supports the training of preoperative decisions in liver surgery based on a representative set of case data.

The commission with external reviewers Prof. Thomas Ertl and Prof. Karl-Heinz Höhne lead by Prof. Dietmar Rösner assessed his overall achievements with the best possible grade “Summa Cum Laude”.

For more information and a full PDF download of his thesis visit http://phd.kfiles.de/

Yesterday we received the very sad news that our friend and colleague Dr. Dirk Bartz unexpectedly passed away on Sunday. We wish his family much strength in these difficult times.

He will be sorely missed.

I’m currently at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2008, staffing the Medical Delta booth in the Imagine section (level 2 in the Austria Centre, close to rooms X and Y), together with a number of cool people from the Erasmus Medical Centre Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam and the Leiden University Medical Centre Image Processing Laboratory. If you’re reading this and you’re in the neighbourhood, pop by for a chat and of course some complimentary stroopwafels and drop!

Update:

I’m back at the TU in Delft and the ECR should be finising by this afternoon. Also see the blog summaries of Marion Smits by clicking here, here and here. Below is a photo Marion took of our Medical Delta booth:

Siemens has unveiled the world’s first MR-PET scanner prototype. With this imaging system, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) images can be acquired simultaneously. MRI supplies anatomical (structural) information as context, whilst PET yields functional data, for example on the precise location of tumours and their metastases. See the image below for an example (courtesy of Siemens):

This is yet another new example of “native” multi-field medical datasets, and underlines the need for research on techniques that are able to visualise this type of data.

(news via MedGadget)

Yesterday, I attended a day-long tutorial at the IEEE Visualization 2006 conference dealing with most aspects of medical visualization. You can download all course materials by clicking on this link.