Engineering Commons^™

Multi-Atlas Segmentation Of The Facial Nerve, Bradley M. Gare

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Medical image segmentation is an important step to identify the shape and position of patient anatomy prior to surgical simulation, surgical rehearsal, and surgical planning. It is crucial that the facial nerve (FN) is segmented accurately as damage to this nerve can severely impact facial expression, speech, and taste. Manual segmentation provides accurate results but is time-consuming and labor-intensive; semi-automatic methods of segmentation are more feasible in a clinical setting and can provide accurate results with minimal user involvement. The objective of this work was to create a novel, open-source, multi-atlas based segmentation algorithm of the entire FN requiring minimal …

Endoscopic Targeting Tasks Simulator: An Approach Using Game Engines, Shaun W. Carnegie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The pervasiveness of simulators used in professions requiring the skilled control of expensive machinery such as is the case in the aviation, mining, construction, and naval industries raises an intriguing question about the relatively poor adoption within the field of medicine. Certain surgical procedures such as neuro-endoscopic and laparoscopic lend themselves well to the application of virtual reality based simulators. This is due to the innate ability to decom- pose these complex macro level procedures into a hierarchy of subtasks that can be modelled in a software simulator to augment existing teaching and training techniques.

The research in this thesis …