Hawaii Patent of the Month – September 2021
There are a few different imaging techniques in the medical field, with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) being the most notable. The issue with these imaging techniques is they require the patient to be very still, or the images will not be clear enough for diagnosis. KinetiCor, Inc. has developed a system to help determine the dynamic position of a patient during MRI scanning, to help track and compensate for motion.
They use optical markers attached to the patient which provide optically visible landmarks. A set of corresponding optical detectors which track if a view of the marker is present in the image, and then compares position of the marker in following images. The reference points are used to calculate a baseline position and orientation and calculate a measure of error below a threshold. The motion tracking system can then use a tracking filer to send the estimated pose and any movement to the MRI to allow it to dynamically adjust the scan to compensate for patient motion. The system uses complex algorithms such as a 6 degrees of freedom algorithm which uses target size, rotation angles, and translation vectors to determine the relative displacement of the target’s three centroids and predict the location precisely. The imaging devices computer system is configured to take this information and dynamically adapt its analysis to use images from all cameras that are actually viewing the optical marker.
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