Slicer4:Annotation

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General Features

Allow users to place text, fiducial, ruler, bidimensional rulers, ROIs in 3D or 2D.

Project Page

ARRA Project page

Use Cases / Missing Features

• Slicer3 infrastructure does not define explicit coupling between the annotations (fiducials, labels, measurements etc.) and the image volumes that were used to define these annotations. A general feature that would be needed for self-contained Slicer4 scenes is the record of the pointers that connect annotations and image data explicitly. Motivating use scenarios:
  • Prostate MRI use cases
    • Setup: images of multiple modalities that are complimentary in nature are used to mark cancer-suspicious locations in the anatomy using Slicer fiducial points.
    • Challenge 1: Consistent record-keeping fiducial points must somehow be named consistently to provide information on what modality was used for a given point identification identification. Consider 100s of such biopsy cases completed over multiple institutions by personnel that received different training.
    • Challenge 2: Automatic processing Imagine an automated algorithm that allows to define the margins of the tumor from the single seed point. We already have the biopsy data. We would like to apply the algorithm to determine the tumor margins from 100s of previous biopsy cases. How would the code know which fiducial to use for initialization without manual interaction? Similar scenario: Assume I have a large database of RECIST measurements stored as Slicer scenes, and now I would like to run automatic tumor segmentation initialized with that measurement. This last use case is one of the driving cases for AVT development.