Trip report: Barcelona

In the last week of June I was in Barcelona, Spain attending CARS together with Ricardo and Slicer summer project week as the only representative of Kitware.

First was project week, starting on Monday (photo above). There I helped Peter Behringer from BWH adjust BSpline registration parameters for prostate MRIs after transitioning from Slicer3 to Slicer4. I also gave some advice in Automatic Cephalometric Analysis. I had a some discussions with Laura Sanz and Javier Pascau from Madrid regarding surface scanners, which we need in one of our ongoing projects (skull correction). I had my jaw ultrasound scanned (picture below) and even my face 3D-scanned!

The project for which I needed and received help was ultrasound guided jaw surgery. I learned that small air bubbles get trapped in the beard, which degrades ultrasound image quality. Some different volume reconstruction parameters were also suggested. But most importantly, I found out that bone can be segmented from 2D ultrasound images! This is very important for the project, and we intend to make bone enhancement an aim in the phase 2 proposal due in September.

On Tuesday evening project week gang went to the beach, as fireworks were expected due to St. John the Baptist holiday the next day. That was the only time I moved a bit further away from the conference hotel (picture below).

On Wednesday evening project week ended and CARS started:

On Thursday morning I presented as e-poster the newest paper from PET/CT guided needle biopsy project. On Saturday morning were the oral presentations by Ricardo and myself of work in the skull correction project (abnormal head shape in babies). The conference ended on Saturday late in the afternoon.

On a sidenote, we also tried some local specialties (because I was travelling I could choose not to fast even though it was Ramadan), like octopus with potatoes:

… and fried anchovies: