December 20, 2010
School of Engineering, Coimbatore
 

Chancellor Amma encourages the Amrita faculty and students to undertake interdisciplinary research to solve societal problems. Now M.Tech. students at the Coimbatore campus are beginning to realize their Chancellor’s vision by using technology to make medical imaging easier for practitioners at the Health Sciences campus.
 

Research projects of four M.Tech. student teams from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at School of Engineering, Coimbatore resulted in cutting-edge medical imaging software programs for the field of diagnostic medicine.
 

These programs developed in-house by the students were recently installed at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) in Kochi.
 

“The indexing, searching and content adaptation of medical multimedia information, otherwise known as Medical Imaging, has been a daunting task for healthcare institutions,” stated Prof. P. N. Kumar, Chairperson, Department of CSE.
 

“The need for better equipment and techniques for the benefit of patients remains a priority for any hospital. The software that our students developed to analyze various problems in the human body has made diagnosis easier for the doctors.”
 

The first two student projects focused on creating an atlas of human organs viz. the brain and the heart. Titled Structural and Functional Atlas for MRI Brain Images and 2D Atlas of Human Heart for Educational Purposes, both programs fulfilled long-felt needs.
 

While the first project aimed at creating a structural and functional atlas for MRI brain images, the second program was developed for understanding the morphological structures of a human body better, especially the heart.
 

The software programs not only serve as a data set for medical diagnosis, they also help solve clinical problems faced during practitioner training. In both cases, an interactive and user-friendly graphical user interface helps doctors and clinicians use the atlases for teaching or for decision making and diagnosis.
 

Two more projects focused on the 3D reconstruction of teeth and facial structures from 2D images.
 

These projects were respectively titled 3D Reconstruction of Impacted Canines in Human Jaw and 3D Reconstruction of Facial Structures from 2D Images.
 

While the former assists practitioners in finding the position and orientation of an impacted tooth, the latter uses a real-time surgical simulation software program to reconstruct a 3D model of a human head from a collection of two-dimensional images.
 

“A three-dimensional model of human head was successfully generated from the collection of 2D images resulting from a CT/MRI scan of a patient,” proudly stated Rakesh P. B., one of the students who worked on the project. “The generated 3D volume can be rotated and viewed from any angle as a 3D model.”