Tag: healthcare

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3D Printing AR / VR Digital Healthcare HoloLens Image Processing Windows

Visualizing MRI & CT Scans in Mixed Reality / VR / AR, Part 2: 3D Volume Rendering

Region of Interest in a 3D Volume Rendering of an MRI in 3D Slicer

After importing the MRI / CT / Ultrasound data into 3D Slicer in part 1, we’re ready for the first 3D visualization inside the medical software through 3D Volume Rendering. This is a major step to export the 3D model to Unity for visualization through Google ARCore or Microsoft HoloLens, or for 3D printing.

Slices in 3D View

After optimizing brightness and contrast of the image data, the easiest way of showing the data in 3D is to visualize the three visible slices (planes: axial / top / red; sagittal / side / yellow; coronal / frontal / green view) in the 3D view. This gives a good overview of the position and the relation of the slices to each other.

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3D Printing AR / VR Digital Healthcare HoloLens Image Processing Windows

Visualizing MRI & CT Scans in Mixed Reality / VR / AR, Part 1: Importing Data

MRI data with auto W/L in 3D Slicer

Some of the best showcases of Mixed Reality / VR / AR include 3D visualizations of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), CT (computer tomography) or ultrasound scans. 3D brings tremendous advantages for analyzing the scanned images compared to only viewing 2D slices. Additionally, a good visualization brings value to patients who can gain a better understanding if they can easily explore their own body.

As part of the 3D information visualization lecture at the FH St. Pölten, I’m giving an overview of the process of converting an MRI / CT / ultrasound scan into a hologram that you can view on the Microsoft HoloLens or with Google ARCore. This blog post series explains the hands-on parts, so that you can easily re-create the same results using freely available tools.

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App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare HoloLens

How to Combine the Mixed Reality Toolkit, Unity 2017 and Visual Studio 2017

MRI scan visualized through HoloLens and Mixed Reality

Update 20. December 2017: A new release of the Mixed Reality toolkit is now out as an official release. It’s recommended to use this, along with Unity 2017.2.1f1.

Update 13. November 2017: The latest source code of the Mixed Reality toolkit now combines both HoloLens and Mixed Reality headsets into a single toolkit that works with one Unity version: 2017.2.0p1 MRTP 4. It’s a special fork of Unity that is optimized for the “Mixed Reality Toolkit Preview”. A later version of Unity will hopefully combine all environments into a single release again. Read more about the environment setup at the GitHub pull request.

Update 19. October 2017: In the meantime, Unity 2017.2 final has been released, and the dev branch of the Mixed Reality toolkit has been merged back to the master. You should now be fine using the following versions for HoloLens development: Unity 2017.2.0f3+, Mixed Reality Toolkit (master branch), Visual Studio 2017.+4, Windows 10.0.15063.0 SDK.

Original Article: Lately, the tools required for HoloLens / Mixed Reality development have been undergoing profound changes. All three tools involved in building HoloLens apps are being restructured:

  • Unity 2017 unifies Virtual / Augmented Reality APIs, making them flexible enough to target all platforms (e.g., phones with ARKit / ARCore, VR, AR). This also involves new and renamed APIs.
  • HoloToolkit has been renamed to Mixed Reality Toolkit, as Microsoft expands the scope to include the new VR headsets with inside-out tracking going on sale this fall.
  • Visual Studio 2017.3 also introduced some major changes under the hood. This is combined with the C# engine used in Unity slowly being migrated from the old Mono runtime to more recent versions of C#.

With the latest Unity 2017.2.0b11 release, everything should now be coming together. In this blog post, I’m describing how to use the latest versions of the tools for creating and deploying a HoloLens app.

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Digital Healthcare

Reading Blood Oxygen Saturation (SpO2) and Pulse through MySignals / Arduino

The MySignals HW BLE v2 – eHealth and Medical IoT Development Platform for Arduino contains sensors that measure more than 20 biometric parameters. One of the most interesting is the Bluetooth LE SpO2 sensor. How to get started reading live data and visualizing it on the TFT display of the board?

What is the MySignals HW Kit?

The MySignals HW kit contains a shield that requires an Arduino Uno as base. In contrast to the (more expensive) MySignals SW kit, the HW kit is rather basic. Powering it up results in a white screen, instead of a nice interface on the screen. The rest is up to the software developer. As the development is based on Arduino, you need the latest version of the Arduino IDE.

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