Detection and 3D Recovery of Stent Grafts in 2D Xray Sequences

Advisor: Nassir Navab
Supervision by: Stefanie Demirci, Ali Bigdelou

Overview

In the current clinical workflow of endovascular abdominal aortic repairs (EVAR) a stent graft is inserted via an introducer system through one femoral artery into the aneurysmatic aorta under 2D angiographic imaging. Due to the missing depth information in the X-ray visualization, it is highly difficult in particular for junior physicians to place the stent graft in the preoperatively defined position within the aorta. Therefore, methods for accurate stent graft recognition or segmentation in fluoroscopy images are highly required.

In this project, you are supposed to advance the existing MATLAB algorithm to being to detect stent grafts of more shapes (bifurcated and elongated stent grafts) and track the deformation of the shape throughout an entire X-ray sequence. In order to improve the performance of the method for practical application, this new implementation is supposed to be done in C++. Finally, the created algorithms are to be correctly validated online within an animal study in cooperation with our colleagues at the university hospital lab NARVIS as well as with our partner physicians.

You should have profound knowledge of MATLAB and C++ programming. It would be beneficial for the experiment planning if you are able to interact with people from different disciplines smoothly.

If you are interested please send a brief CV as well as a sample of MATLAB code that you have already implemented, to demirci@in.tum.de.

Tasks

• Adaptation of existing MATLAB algorithms to new requirements.
• Conversion to C++ implementation
• Validation of method on synthetic test data and real patient data.
• Animal study at our hospital lab NARVIS in collaboration with Dr. Ghotbi (Kreisklinik München-Pasing) and our partner physicians from Klinikum Innenstadt.

Requirements

• A profound knowledge of MATLAB and C++ is mandatory.
• Interest in medical applications and multidisciplinary work is required.
• Good organizational skill is beneficial.