December 2004 to June 2005:

Preparation of MSc. Thesis "Analysis and Design of GPU-based Algorithms for Interactive Volume Segmentation" at the University of Auckland, New Zealand

• Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Software Development Techniques
• Pattern Recognition, Digital Image Processing, 3D Computer Vision
• Computational Geometry, Parallel Computing

• Medical Imaging Techniques (X-Ray, MRT, CT, UltraSound, PET,...)
• Image Processing Methods for Medical Diagnosis
• Radiological Treatment
• Basic courses in Pathophysiology, Physiology, Anatomy

Please see publications for further details.

• Design and implementation of a multithreaded, synchronized device-control, realtime data acquisition and alignment software; as plugin for vendor specific software-suite
• Contribution to measurement system arrangement and improvement
• Design of a Data Analysis and Visualization Tool for the spatial- and time-resolved multiexponential measurement data
• Development of an Image Registration Tool using the ITK-Library

Head of Research Group: HDoz. Dr.-Ing. habil. Dietrich Schweitzer

• Design and implementation of GPU-based 3D image processing techniques, including:
  • Mean- and anisotropic diffusion filter for image enhancement
  • Threshold-based segmentation and seeding
  • 3D morphological seed manipulation
  • 3D theshold-based and anisotropic diffusion-based seeded region growing segmentation
• Integration as a plugin into the Visualization Toolkit architecture
• Development of an application providing
  • im/export of 3D datasets
  • GUI for interactive control of filter\segmentation process
  • basic volume rendering / slice viewing using VTK visualization functionality

Supervised by Prof. Denzler and Burkhard Wünsche, PhD

• Design, implementation and test of a Windows Driver Model (WDM) device driver for an ophthalmic Fundus Camera under Windows XP
• Contribution to technical project documentation

My assignment was the development of the measurement software "EyeScan" with the following features:

• control of the measurement sequence
• streaming of continuous video images of reflected light from the Confocal Laser Scanning Ophthalmoscope in real-time
• adjustment of the control-parameters of a special Time-Correlated-Single-Photon-Counting PCI device to detect fluorescence-photons
• triggers synchronized measurements of a framegrabber and the TCSPC-device
• visualization of the collected 2-dimensional autofluorescence distribution of the fundus in pseudo-color which can be interactively adjusted
• automatical detection of eye-movements between different measurements by image-registration techniques
• merge of several shift corrected measurements to increase the number of detected photons per pixel
• visualization of the decay versus time curve for every pixel of the fluorescence image at the mouse-cursor
• storage of the acquired reflection- and fluorescence-data in a specific fileformat
• export of fluorescence-decay-data for further analysis
• provides an easy to use graphical user interface
• uses DirectDraw to increase performance

Supervised by HDoz. Dr.-Ing. habil. Dietrich Schweitzer

• reads a set of fundus camera images at different wavelengths
• performs several image processing techniques to detect the location and expansion of retinal blood vessels
• computes the 2-dimensional local distribution of the oxygen saturation in vessel areas as well as the ocular fundus itself
• visualizes the oxygen saturation with a pseudocolor technique which the user can interactively adjust
• allows export of computed saturation data to an ASCII-file format to easily enable further processing in other applications

Under direction by HDoz. Dr.-Ing. habil. Dietrich Schweitzer

• receives real-time data from an arterial and central-venous-catheter based physiological monitor system
• performs pulse-contour analysis on the blood-pressure curve to detect systoles and computes the systolic-pressure-variation, a new technique for clinical assessment of cardiac preload and volume responsiveness which was the subject of the PhD thesis
• visualizes a detailed blood-pressure curve with a trend-curve as well as other physiological hemodynamic variables like current heart rate, systolic and diastolic arterial blood pressure
• streams the received data to a file and offers export of relevant data to Excel compatible files
• has successfully been used during major surgery and proved clinical relevance of the concept of systolic-pressure-variation

Supervised by Samir Sakka, MD, PhD

• Conception, development and examination of automated test processes for the Vulpine Vision 3D Engine
• Generation and tweaking of shaders within the Vulpine ShaderTool
• Collaboration on the implementation of constructive solid geometry functions within Vulpine proprietary tools

References provided on request

• Development of a highspeed projection system for an optical 3D-Scanning-System using DirectDraw
• Maintenance of the code of a configuration program of the optical 3D-Scanning-System
• Programming a microcontroller for an underwater transmissiometer built for environmental investigations, which controls the electronic parts inside and communicates (receiving commands as well as transferring measured data) with an user above the water surface
• Programming "VisualBasic for Applications"-macros for Excel to process the acquired data and storing it via ODBC in an Oracle database

References provided on request