Thursday, November 20, 2008

This is what I do.

I'm doing this research project at the Computer Vision Center in Barcelona which is called 'Motion Analysis In Terms Of WVCE'. What is Motion Analysis? What does WVCE mean? Well, I'm currently trying to find that out. :-)
Well, WVCE stands for Wireless Video Capsule Endoscopy and takes its part of medical imaging technologies within computer science. Imagine the following situation: Something hurts inside your stomach and you don't know what it is. You go to the Doc and she says, she has to run some tests on you. Finally she tells you that if you really want to know what it is and where it comes from you have to let them do a procedure on you that is called intestinal endoscopy or gastroscopy. Long story short, they stick a camera mounted on a tube up your ass and taker a closer look from inside. Not good! Therefore some eggheads from the lab have discovered a new method. They let you swallow a capsule with a camera inside. This capsule is not much bigger than a regular pain killer (the very strong ones :-) and follows your digestion like everything else. After that, someone has to elaborate the video. For a trained expert this takes up to 8 hours. This is where the lovely words motion and analysis come into account. A computer should do all of this work instead. So, my work is to find out a sequence of different procedures to make the computer able to "see" and to look through all the videos and identify the motion of the intestine. Weird thing!
The images from inside the intestine are lovely. Unfortunately I can't show them to you because I had to sign a contract to state that I'm going to use all this material very very confidently. I'll keep you informed!

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