Research Projects (2008)

MARCUS is an exchange program with the Human Interface Technologies Laboratory (Christchurch, NZ) and the University of Otago (Otago, NZ). Its aim is to extend the scope of the research work performed in the EU Integrated Project "IPCity" with researchers in New Zealand.

The focus of research will be on how mobile devices can create new types of interactive urban experiences. For example, location specific information overlaid on the real world can be used to aid navigation through cities, in outdoor game play, or for providing user supplied comments at certain sites.

IMPPACT is a European research project, which develops an intervention planning system for Radiofrequency Ablation of malignant liver tumours. TU Graz is dealing with medical visualization and augmented reality in the project. Problem or Context Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA) is a minimally invasive form to treat cancer without open surgery, by placing a needle inside the malignancy and destroying it through intensive heating. Though the advantages of this approach are obvious, the intervention is currently hard to plan, almost impossible to monitor or assess, and therefore is not the first choice for treatment. Project IMPPACT will develop a physiological model of the liver and simulate the RFA intervention result, accounting for patient specific physiological factors.

• Closing gaps in the understanding of particular aspects of the RFA treatment by multi-scale studies on cells and animals
• Transforming microscopic findings and into macroscopic equations
• Extending the long-established bio-heat equation to incorporate multiple scales
• Validating results at multiple levels
• Cross checking validity for human physiology by comparison to images from ongoing patient treatment
• Visual comparison of simulation and treatment results gathered in animal studies and during patient treatment
• Extensive validation together with a user-centred software design approach guarantee suitability of the solution for clinical practice

Mathematical modelling together with experimental validation lead to a patient specific intervention planning system. read more Expected Results & Impacts IMPPACT will be modelling a physiological organ including the metabolism and patient specific tissue properties. This alone is a huge step forward as compared to the state-of-the-art intervention planning systems that do not address this issue.

The IPS will allow prediction of treatment results on a patient specific base. It will therefore bring down the risk of local recurrences and eliminate the nowadays so common repeated treatments of the same tumour, making RFA an as effective treatment as resection.

Augmented Reality (AR) combines real and virtual in a single view, putting information right were it belongs - into the real world. AR is still a young research field and hence strongly driven by basic research and experimental methods, while only few successful commercial applications have been deployed. One of the reasons is that past hardware (such as head-mounted displays and Tablet PCs) have not been sufficiently inexpensive and ergonomically satisfactory. Therefore, recent AR research shows a trends towards deploying AR on advanced mobile phones, using the phone camera as video see-through interface for a “magic lens” style of AR. Recent research in the proposer’s group has first the first time established a baseline technology for achieving real-time performance AR on mobile phones, and this development has been meet with great interest from industry. This proposal the logical consequence of this development. It is concerned with extending this research in several directions, in particular making techniques more scalable (sometimes several orders of magnitude), so that realistic real world scenarios interesting for commercial applications can be attacked by industry. Firstly, we want to expand our real-time computer-vision based pose tracking and object recognition techniques. Secondly, we propose to develop realistic AR image synthesis and visualization methods. Thirdly, we suggest an investigation into efficient 3D interaction techniques with and for AR phones. Finally, we suggest the creation of a distributed infrastructure based on Web 2.0 technology for scalable content creation and deployment of geo-referenced AR applications on phones.