TALK    Image and Sensor-based Navigation in Fluorescence Endoscopy

Date & Time:

Thursday, September 1, 2011; 12:00 PM

Abstract:

Today, photodynamic diagnostics is commonly used for cancer detection in endoscopic interventions of the urinary bladder. Although the visual contrast between benign and malignant tissue is significantly enhanced using fluorescence markers, the field of view (FOV) of the endoscope becomes very limited. This impedes the navigation and the re-identifying of multi-focal tumors for the physician. Thus, new image mosaicking algorithms and visualization methods, which provide larger FOVs in real-time from free-hand bladder scans are developed and will be presented. Furthermore a novel method for an automatic control of seamless inspections using graphs are addressed. Going beyond image processing, a first low-cost inertial 3-D navigation system will be introduced, and a guided navigation tool for tumor re-identification and its application to virtual endoscopy will be discussed.

Speaker:

Alexander Behrens
RWTH Aachen University

Alexander Behrens received the Dipl.-Ing. in Electrical Engineering from Leibniz University in Hanover, Germany, where he did work on gesture recognition and image processing of remote sensing data. He also worked at Robert Bosch GmbH, where he completed a thesis on moving object segmentation. He was also a former MERL intern in 2005 and worked with us on multiview video coding. He is currently pursuing a PhD degree at the Institute of Imaging & Computer Vision at RWTH Aachen University, Germany with focus on endoscopic image processing. His research interests are in medical and industrial image processing, signal processing, pattern recognition, and computer vision.

MERL Host:

Anthony Vetro

External Link:

http://www.lfb.rwth-aachen.de/en/staff/alb.html