Call for Papers: MICCAI 2012 Workshop on Augmented Environments for Computer-Assisted Interventions (AE-CAI)

Posted on 2. May 2012 by MAR

7th MICCAI 2012 Workshop on Augmented Environments for Computer-Assisted Interventions: AE-CAI (formerly known as AMI-ARCS)

AE-CAI 2012: http://ae-cai2012.imaging.robarts.ca  

Workshop Objective: MICCAI 2012 Workshop on Augmented Environments for Computer-Assisted Interventions (AE-CAI) – formerly known as AMI-ARCS – continues the tradition of previous workshops and tutorials spanning the last nine years. The 2012 edition of AMI-ARCS will be hosted in conjunction with MICCAI 2012 at the Acropolis Convention Centre in Nice, France on October 5th, 2012.

Paper Submission: We invite electronic 8-10-page LNCS (MICCAI) style manuscript submissions to be considered for oral or poster presentation. Papers will be reviewed by members of the program committee and assessed for quality and best means of presentation. We encourage submission of papers that demonstrate clinical relevance, clinical applications and validation studies.

LNCS style guidelines are available here: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.

Paper Submission Website: Follow this link to the AE-CAI 2012 paper submission system. Create an account using your email address and follow the steps, and submit your paper in PDF format. Please note that papers do NOT need to be anonymous – include all authors and reference your previous work accordingly. The paper submission website can be accessed here: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/AECAI2012/

Topics to be addressed in AE-CAI 2012 include, but are not limited to

  •  Medical Augmented and Virtual Reality
  • Surgical Simulation and Training
  • Multimodal Data Visualization and Image Fusion
  • Image-guided Surgical Navigation and Robotics
  • Virtual Endoscopy and Colonoscopy
  • Display Technology for Medical Imaging and Visualization
  • Image Guided Intervention System and Platforms

Important Dates

  • April 15th, 2012                    Submission Site Opens
  • May 31st, 2012                     Paper Submission Deadline
  • July 6th, 2012                        Notification of Acceptance
  • July 12th, 2012                      Early-bird Registration Deadline
  • July 23rd, 2012                      Camera-ready Papers Due
  • October 5th, 2012                 AE-CAI Workshop Nice

New This Year! Springer LNCS Post-workshop Proceedings Publication

Extended versions of selected papers presented at AE-CAI will be published as post-workshop proceedings in a special volume of the Springer LNCS book series (same series as the MICCAI proceedings) in the spring of 2013.

Posted in Conferences, General | Leave a comment

Time of Flight Cameras for Endoscopy

Posted on 25. April 2012 by MAR

Sensing 3D geometry of a minimally invasive operation site through an endoscope camera is not an easy job. Simply using color information from the camera in combination with automatic or semi-automatic identification and tracking of natural or artificial landmarks inside the body is quite difficult and error prone.

Sven Haase of the Pattern Recognition Lab, Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg recently presented a time efficient way to prepare sensor fusion of a Time-of-Flight (ToF) and an RGB sensor at BVM 2012 – Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin.

In addition to color information, ToF cameras are able to measure depth information from a scene. For this reason, the ToF camera (or additional software) provides for every pixel beside its grey value also a radial distance value describing the surfaces being viewed by the camera.

According to Sven Haase, ”the system is still in a prototypical stage and subject of fundamental research”. However, researchers plan to equip endoscopes with this system to enhance visual information for improved intra-operative decision making. Thanks to ToF cameras, the surgeon would be able to access in addition to a simple color projection of the camera image also views of the 3D topology of the operation site. The resulting 3D elevation profile can then be combined with color information from the endoscope camera and viewed from different perspectives. A screenshot of an experimental scene, imitating an operation site, is shown in the following picture. Here, color image information is acquired by the endoscope camera. The image on the bottom-right shows the result of Sven Haases’s system having processed the raw data of the ToF camera in order to remove noise and improve image quality.

Image courtesy of Sven Haase, Pattern Recognition Lab, Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Posted in General, Selected Papers, Systems | Leave a comment