Aquatics trial: Measurement and reporting on the web client

Date: 10/2003 Production: CRS4 - D Master: CD113 Encoding: DivX

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Abstract

AQUATICS aims at providing a simple and effective collaborative diagnosis and treatment planning to interventional radiologists performing endovascular repair of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms.

The purpose of AQUATICS is to introduce in an actual clinical setting a novel web service application dedicated to the planning of the endovascular treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysms. The main expected result of the project is to show that it is possible for clinical institutions to delegate sophisticated IT tasks, such as medical imaging processing, to a specialized network distributed service based on lightweight middleware and that is feasible both from a clinical and an economic point of view.

AQUATICS is based on a fast and reliable 3D segmentation of CT data and on a web service distributing the reconstructed models as VRML97 files with an associated interface allowing measurements and DICOM3 compliant reporting.

The AQUATICS service provides a complete system for obtaining the necessary information for a correct treatment of the AAA. CT images are submitted through Internet to a remote site, where the lumen of the aneurysm and its centerline are extracted as geometric models by specialized personnel. The segmentation station performing this operation uses 3D deformable surfaces for extracting the whole geometry of the vessel, a voxel coding method to extract the centerline and a marching cube method to add calcifications if requested. 3D models are exported in VRML97 format, introducing Javascript code to allow the user measurements and including some pre-computed parameters to have a faster AAA evaluation. The complete process can be achieved in less than 30 minutes. VRML models can be analyzed by the interventional radiologist using a standard web browser with a VRML plugin. This application enables him to accurately measure lenghts, angles and to navigate through the vessel lumen.

The AQUATICS Project is the Workpackage 12 of the EUTIST-M Cluster (IST-1999-20226). Partners are ENEA (Bologna), CRS4 (Cagliari), University of Pisa, RASNA s.r.l. (Firenze) and University of Innsbruck. CRS4-BMA IPPS has the techncal management of the project.

See Also

Details on the project are available from our AQUATICS page.