Master's Thesis - Studierstube Augmented Reality Project - Graz ...

Chapter 7
Future Work
This chapter gives an overview of the vast possibilities for future work. Referring to figure
2.12 from chapter 2, section 7.2 itemizes some possible improvements of the already
implemented new visualizations. Some further derivable quantities of the measurement
method presented in chapter 3 are outlined in section 7.3. Usability and controllability
of the algorithms are treated in section 7.4 with a special focus on augmented and
virtual reality ideas. Finally section 7.5 deals with one of the most important questions
for future developments: ”Are the attempted efforts expedient for clinical routine at
all?”.
7.1 Measurement Method and Preprocessing
The measurement method itself provides much more than the quantification of velocity
in the blood. Theoretically all moving tissues and fluids in the human body can be
investigated. For example a measurement of the movement of the myocardium or the
flow of synovial fluid could be useful as well. As mentioned in chapter 3 a method to
pre-estimate the v enc value and a sequence which can perform with respiration of the
patients would be desirable too.
The Siemens 4D-Flow Toolbox, respectively the calculation tool is currently a nice
and powerful tool to process the raw MRI image data fast and accurate. Nevertheless
a segmentation of interesting or rather flow-undefined regions by hand is a quite
exhausting and time consuming task. Consequently, the following improvements are
proposed:
• An automatic segmentation of the myocardium respectively of these regions which
are definitely valid flow values. This would be a vision task, so these deficiencies
were not illuminated closer in this work on visualization. However, if such a
segmentation would perform accurate the segmentation borders itself could be
used for a direct visualization of the tissue as surface.
• Better algorithms for an automatic aliasing correction are available because the
course of the flow velocity values is not as linear as indicated in figure 4.3 in chap-
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