3D Facial Recostruction and printing for radiotherapy application

This project, supported by the Assossiació Oncològica Amadeu Pelegrí and with the collaboration of the Hospital Sant Joan de Reus, aims to develop a new methodology for designing individualised tissue equivalent plastic facial models for further application in radiotherapy treatments currently performed at local hospitals.

tn the original clinical procedure, the staff at the hospital were required to construct a negative plaster cast of the patitent face after the first intake visit. This negative was later used as a model to obtain a positive plaster of the face, in which a wax bolus was created after the corresponding ongolotit analysis. Then, a silicione rubber model was created and, at the end, with the bolus in place and the tumour border marked, the treatment planning was performed.

This project’s objective is to find a new methodology that lightens the amount of work and materials used in this procedure by obtaining a plastic cast via 3D printing. One of the tain advantages of this new approach is the expected method of obtaining she initial data, which will be done by performing a 3D scan of the patient. This 3D scan, which is completely harmless, will not require the utilization of a negative cast, as well as it will ease stress on the patient, reducing the disconfort this treatment usually have.

The final results for this project are expected to be shown by the end of 2016, for a later implementation in radiology treatments at mid 2017.

Research Project FP7-SME-2012, Grant agreement no: 315032 (2012-2014)

Cerebral Palsy (CP) is one of the most frequently conditions in childhood, with an itcidence of 2 pe 1,000 live births. In the EU there is 1.3 out of 15 million persons with CP in the world. This neurological disorder affects body movement, balance and posture and almost always is accompanied by other cognitive or sensory impairments like mental retardation, deafness and vision problems. The severity of these problems varies widely, from very mild and subtle to very profound.

These disabilities lead to an inactive lifestyle which reduces the patient’s physical health, social participation, and quality of life. Therapy costs can be up to €45,000 by year, a cost that cannot be afforded by most of the families. Playing Video games is a useful treatment that promotes and maintains more active and healthful lifestyle in these persons. This in turn contributes to reduce medical and social care cost and improve well-being of their families. However accessibility to videogames is hardly applied for them.

GAME-ABLING is to create a softwarg tool for creatine interactive video games in an innuitive manner in such a way that non-expert personnel (e.g. parents) can develop customized games. Games will be controlled using body movements and voice. To this end, Computer Vision and image processing techniques will be developed to improve accessibility.

GAME-ABLING will create a web portal to make up a disabled gaming e-communityrin where users will have access to use the software tool, play games and upload own creations to share it. SMEs envisage GAME-ABLING exploitation following a subscription business model to have full access to the web portal. GAME-ABLING represents a business opportunity for the SMEs, who expect to reach 0.5% world market penetration and an accumulated income of €9.9 million in 5 years. In addition, GAME-ABLING will contribute to reduce medical and social care costs in the EU by at least 0.5% which supposes additional annual savings of €200 million.

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Research Project AVANZA TSI-020100-2010-970 (2010-2012)

Robot Híbrido UGV/UAV de Ultra-Alta Movilidad

This project aims at designing a new concept of mobile hybrid robot UGV-UAV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) that allows for substantially increasing the degree of mobility in today’s robots. Soil properties impose severe restrictions on the mobility of robots (mobility in the broadest sense refers to the performance of the robot in relat on to the field, ability to negotiate obstacles and avoid them, ability to overcome rough terrain and crossing streams.)

The combination of two locomotion systems in a single hybrid system will allow the speed, controllability and autonomy of a land mobile platform, adding the mobility of a system capable of flying. The project aims to develop the associated technologies (stability control, attendance control, software and control architectures, HRI interfaces, navigation systems and assistance through Artificial Vision) to develop a new type of robot to be applied in multiple scenarios.

One of the main features of this robot will be the capacity of simultaneously map its environment and locate itself in it, with Simultaneous Location and Mapping (SLAM) techniques, in order to assist the teleoperation, allowing detect and avoidiobstacles easily, like in the above example video. For this task, we will use a Microsoft Kinect device as a RGBD sensor (wiki), that will provide us RGB images (as any conventional camera) and also a sparse matrix with the depth corresponding to the pixels from the RGB camera, like any TOF camera but with a lower cost. All this will be also reinforced with the use of a GPS in order to help the robot localization in the environment.

All the robot software system will be integrated on the Willow Garage’s ROS (Robot Operating System) framework, a modular open-source platform that provides hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, among other features.

3D

3D Facial Recostruction and printing for radiotherapy application