2 research outputs found
A fast webcam photogrammetric system to support optical imaging of brain activity
Optical topography (OT) is an emerging neuroimaging technique utilising the tight
coupling between neural activity and regional cerebral blood flow to monitor relative
regional changes of haemoglobin concentration. OT systems are compact, low cost,
easily portable, and relatively tolerant of body movements enabling clinical diagnosis,
psychological experiments and even monitoring brain activities during daily living. There
is a requirement for such systems to present their output functional data in a brain
model based coordinate space in order to map to the signal source with brain anatomy.
However OT data are obtained from a network of OT sensing devices (optodes) placed
in contact with the head surface and cannot capture structural information of the
underlying brain which might otherwise be used for registration. An appropriate
registration method, widely used in Electroencephalography (EEG), is the 10-20 system
which utilises bony landmarks as common points to co-register locations on the scalp
with a brain model to a repeatability of a few millimetres in clinical applications to an MRI
set of reference points. Inheriting the low cost and portability of OT, this thesis develops
and validates a novel registration approach utilising off-the-shelf webcam technology in
combination with photogrammetric bundle adjustment techniques in order to reliably
coordinate targets on optodes and bony landmarks within the 10:20 reference frame to
an accuracy of better than 1mm.
Initial research includes an assessment of the 3D coordination accuracy, precision and
stability of a series of low cost webcams in order to prove their suitability for clinical
applications. Results demonstrate the capability of a system based on these cameras to
reliably coordinate 3D target locations to the order of 0.5mm and better. Difficulties in
automated clinical target image extraction due to poor image quality are circumvented
through the development of new target image detection methods. Incremental
improvements in image quality from successive webcam generations, up to and
including the latest HD systems, are shown to increase coordination accuracy by one
order of magnitude. The result is a novel webcam photogrammetric system that is able
to rapidly and consistently coordinate targets on optodes and bony landmarks to better
than 1mm in OT studies and is able to take advantage of the rapid advances being made in consumer webcam technology. The system is proven in pre-clinical studies to
evaluate its coordination accuracy and in simulated clinical OT studies with a
head-sized phantom conducted in collaboration with Department of Medical Physics
and Bioengineering. Clinical OT studies with human subjects, demonstrate the
capability of the system to continuously coordinate targets on optodes and scalp and
detect differential movement between optodes and scalp which would invalidate a static
registration procedure