Research

Collaborative Research

Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS)

Faculty memebrs of the department have taken up research projects in collaboration with Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, a multi and super speciality hospital in Cochin. The students of the specialized programme M.Tech in Computer Vision and Image Processign have an excellent opportunity to work in these real time projects. Medical Image Processing is the thrust in this research. A few of these projects are given below. These projects are an eye opener to inter disciplinary research.

• Dr. Latha Parameswaran Professor and Vice Chairperson, CSE and Dr. Shanmuga Sundaram, Professor Nuclear Medicine, Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi collaborated on the project Image Tagging -Visible watermarking on PET/CT images stored in png format
• Mr. T.Senthil Kumar, Assistant Professor, CSE and Dr. Kumar Menon- Physician Incharge Center For Digital Health, Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi collaborated on the project Human Anatomy ATLAS for educational purpose
• Mr. T.Senthil Kumar, Assistant Professor, CSE and Dr Sherif Peter, Head and Neck Department – Plastic reconstructive Surgery, Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi collaborated on the project 3D Modelling for cosmetic surgery
• Ms. H. Smith, Assistant Professor, CSE and Dr.Alice Kurien, Dental Informatics – In Charge, Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi collaborated on the project 3D view of the Tooth Structure
• Ms. Hema P Menon, Assistant Professor, CSE and Dr. Anand Kumar, Professor and In Charge – Neurology Department, Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi collaborated on the project Structural and Functional ATLAS for Brain MRI
• Structural and Functional Atlas for MRI Brain Images
  This work aims at creating a structural and functional atlas for MRI Brain images, which would help to solve clinical problems, faced during the training periods and can also be referred as a data set for medical diagnosis. The existing Atlas of Brain provides only the Structural details, and for the clinicians functional details are more crucial for decision making.
  Magnetic Resonance (MR) images of brain from normal person were used as the data set for formation of the Atlas. All the views of MRI brain images, i.e., axial, sagittal and coronal were considered. These images are subjected to segmentation and labeling, in order to tag the required structural components of the human Brain. These segmented images are stored in a data base with each segment being labelled by the corresponding part name. An interactive and user friendly GUI has been developed which would help the doctors/ clinicians to use the atlas for teaching or for decision making/diagnosis.
• 3D Reconstruction of Impacted Canines in Human Jaw
  3D reconstruction is the process of capturing the shape and appearance of real objects. Construction of 3D model of Canine Impacted Human jaw helps in finding the position and orientation of the impacted tooth. This model helps the dentists in doing Canine Impacted Human jaw treatments easily.
  Complicated concepts which are difficult to visualize can be simplified with the help of 3D reconstruction. Thus the doctors can to an extent identify the impacted tooth before starting the treatment. Patients are also in a comfortable state if the dentist is able to locate canines at first attempt instead of doing multiple cuts to make localization. With the help of this technique dental students can make measurement and analysis for learning purpose.
• 3D Reconstruction of Facial Structures from 2D Images
  3D-operation planning which makes the preoperative visualization of patient’s postoperative appearance is one of the main applications in reconstructive and cranio-facial surgeries. The current preoperative surgical planning with respect to tissue changes is based mostly on frontal analysis of 2D information sources such as photographs and X-rays. It is necessary to develop automatic guided software for performing cosmetic surgery by the process of simulating three dimensional visualization techniques suitable for the display of complex structures of the facial skeleton and of skull base.
  This work proposes an approach to develop a suitable computer-based three dimensional visualization technique which can construct a three dimensional image from the given set of two-dimensional images. Three dimensional surface reconstruction of cranial anatomy is obtained from CT (Computer Tomographic) or MRI (Magnetic Resonance Images) images.
  The surgeon can browse and select a particular section or whole of dicom images from the given dataset using a dicom viewer by which he can check the whole information and data in the images. An iso-surface reconstruction algorithm based on marching cubes is used to develop a 3D model from a collection of 2D dataset of images. The iso-surfaces will be extracted and reconstructed to form a three dimensional model of the human head which will be a 3D volume which can be rotated and viewed from any angle by the surgeon.
• 2D Atlas of Human Heart for Educational Purposes
  Human heart anatomy is the study of morphological structures and relationships between morphological structures. Hence such a study when visualized in the form of a two dimensional atlas can hold strong interactive sessions between doctors and medical students. Atlas is a visualization technique developed for understanding the morphological structures of a human body. Interacting directly with morphological structures contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of them in spatial relation to their surroundings.
  The purpose of this project is to develop new interactive system, where the system provides a 2D atlas of the human heart in detail. Image segmentation is done to segment different parts of the morphological structures while performing structure analysis in the system.
• Localization of Lesions in Brachial Plexus
  The brachial plexus is formed by the union of the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth cervical ventral rami and the first thoracic ventral ramus. The brachial plexus is a very important structure and can be injured through various types of trauma. The size and complexity of brachial plexus shows that neither single Nerve Conduction Study nor muscle assessable by Needle Electrode Examination is capable of evaluating it in its entirety. This projects aims at identifying the location of lesion in the brachial plexus.
• Remote Clinical Monitoring In dynamic healthcare environments, caregivers, patients, and equipment are constantly moving. To be productive, caregivers need the ability to reach each other and securely access information and services from wherever they happen to be. For today’s mobile caregivers, the workspace can be anywhere—the point of care, hospital corridor, or at home. And yet, nurses and doctors typically can only access information from the nursing station or physician’s office, using a stationary computer with network access. Constantly going back and forth to these network connection points erodes productivity, causes fatigue, and can delay care.
  In this project, we were able to develop a sensor based system which can communicate at regular intervals via a normal mobile phone to another phone through the existing GSM network. At the client side, we have a temperature sensor which is connected to the PIC microcontroller which in turn is connected to the phone through an RS232 converter. This device continuously monitors the patient and sends the body temperature values to the server side mobile at the hospital. This mobile is connected to our SMS server. The data received periodically is stored in a DB and can be interpreted from time to time into graphs and other pictorial representation.
  Next phase is a network application which is installed in the hospital. Each doctor will be allotted separate login id and password. He/She can login to our system anywhere from the hospital. In case of any undesirable variations, the doctor will be informed through this messenger system. The doctor has to login into his account to make the messenger active. At any point, if the doctor is not online then an alert is sent to his mobile. This product also has a web application using which the doctor can monitor the patient even while he is travelling. For testing purpose, we used only Temperature sensor. It has provisions to interface seven more sensors to monitor various critical parameters of a patient.

AMRITA-VIRTUAL INTERACTIVE E-LEARNING WORLD (A-VIEW)

• Indexing and retrieval of e-learning materialsAutomatic meta data extraction from multimedia data.

CYBER SECURITY

• Hardware based Network Intrusion Detection system for High Speed Networks

Though many researchers have developed algorithms or techniques or methods to perform event detection, object identification and tracking, most of them have developed and tested it for a known dataset (or a publicly available dataset). Very less work has been reported on such techniques for a real-time environment. Thus in Indian context, our proposed project and research will be significant, as we are planning to develop and deploy this in an existing building, thus making it become “smarter” to cater to safety of people. In precise, this work will focus on safety and security of people and objects in a building and to connect to first responders in case of emergencies.

The proposed system includes setting up cameras and vision systems in a building, developing smart applications that run over this infrastructure and the underlying database system to record events and the videos. The major components of this project would be:

Setting up vision systems: This would be required to detect events, objects, people, identify location, and monitor the infrastructure. There are a variety of cameras and vision systems available in the market such as night vision cameras, IP cameras, thermal imaging cameras, web cameras etc. Our goal is to utilize the experience we have gained from our pervious project Indoor Information Representation and Management System (IIRMS) project funded by NRDMS, DST where some work on event detection has been done [19]. Identifying suitable cameras and selecting the appropriate locations for day and night vision will be the highest priority.

Developing Applications: Once the infrastructure is set, we propose to develop efficient algorithms for object identification and tracking; unusual event detection and raising alarms/ warnings.

At the end of the project, we plan to have a complete study suggesting the best location for placing cameras/ vision systems for a smart building, a framework for configuring vision systems, a suite of algorithms to support object identification and tracking and specific events detection.

Key words: Event detection, image and video sequences, people tracking, vision systems

Objectives:

The broad objective of this project is to develop a) a framework for smart buildings that supports efficient indoor tracking algorithms for detecting events such as crowded areas, fire, smoke etc. using vision systems b) identification and tracking of moving objects over indoor spaces. This framework will complement the indoor information system developed as a part of the earlier IIRMS project funded by DST. We shall also explore integration of standards like SWE over IndoorGML and extending IndoorGML to include representation of objects and event is another important goal, which can help standardize the smart building applications. Specific objectives include the following, efficient algorithms will be developed, tested and deployed:

Specific Objective 1: Develop algorithms and build application for identifying unexpected events like locating crowded areas, fire detection, rain detection, smoke detection, electrical burst, and water burst in a given building.

Specific Objective 2: Develop algorithms and build application for identifying major assets and tracking their movement from one place to another from time to time (spatiotemporal) in this environment.

Computational thinking for Research and Education (CORE) Lab

The CORE Lab is an initiative by an Interest Group from the Computer Science and Engineering department in an attempt to transfer learning process from classrooms to practical domains. The lab offers opportunities and mentorship for students to strategically approach and solve problems the Computational Thinking way. This is the first lab of its kind in the country that sets a personal timeline for students to explore, experiment and learn by integrating theory and practice using computational thinking strategies.

For details on projects, talks, research activities, etc. please contact corelab@cb.amrita.edu

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Smart Spaces Lab

With the government of India’s focus on “Digital India”, building Smart Cities is one of its major initiative. For smart cities to be built or renovated, it is essential that the existing buildings and infrastructure become smarter. In this project we aim to develop a software framework on which applications can be developed for buildings, to respond to emergencies and disaster management.

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