[Insight-users] Suggestions and Help

[Jacob Boomgaarden]

Hello All -

Thanks to all who have borne with me and continue to provide help to my
que stions. Luis, your assistance with getting ITK to compile and build
on my SGI was extremely helpful!

I'm doing a summer internship collaboration in Fairbanks, Alaska, at the
Arctic Region Supercomputing Center and have not been receiving much
direction or guidance from my mentor who is constantly out-of-touch with
this project. His goal at the beginning of the summer was to do a 3D
reconstruction of the human lung using the Visible Human dataset, and to
then create an animation of this lung according to specific breathing
patterns.

Doing our beginning research for this project led us in the direction of
Kitware's open-source Toolkits (ITK and VTK). My specific portion of the
project is that dealing with reconstruction of the lung from the dataset
and I am having a hard time finding a first foothole to start with.

I've read many portions of the ITK software guide, as I believe the
software system of ITK has the capabilities of what I want to achieve,
but I am still somewhat fuzzy on which classes and algorithms I should
be paying most attention to for my goals. With that in mind, I have some
general questions I would like to pose:

1.)  I am under the impression that the "Segmentation" algorithms that
ITK provides are tools to accomplish what I am trying to do, but am
unsure of this. After reading through examples it is still unclear to me
whether these classes filter images creating a new image, or whether
they segment regions and allow for outputing some sort of data
representation of that region, or maybe I'm still not on the right
understanding of these algorithms. Any information or strict capability
definitions would be great.

2.)  Some of the ideas that we have brainstormed about include reading
in one image of data, extracting the contours or data points along the
region of the lungs and repeating this idea to create some sort of
structured point-set model or mesh of the lung. I am curious as to
whether this is first of all, a feasible approach, and secondly whether
ITK has the capabilities of doing this and if so, how?

3.)  Another idea we had generated was doing something with the actual
volume rendering of data over the lungs.Is this a better approach and is
this at all feasible with ITK?

4.)  Is there somewhere I can get a few sample data slices of the chest
area of the Visible Human dataset that I can work with ITK on?

Any help and inspiration relating to my questions, or other issues
pertaining to my project in general, that you can provide would be
greatly appreciated, as I am unexperienced in this subject and haven't
been able to receive much advice from my own advisor.

Thank you for your time in reading this and for all of your responses,

-- 
Jacob Boomgaarden
ARSC Intern
West Ridge Research Building, Room 011
Phone:  (907)-455-3350
Office: (907)-450-8701
Email: boomgaar at arsc.edu