Hello Greg,

I'm a research fellow under Dr. Kirk Peterson at the University of California San Diego in the School of Medicine and I run the MR Core for the Department of Cardiology. We have developed quite a robust small animal cardiac MR program over the last year to the point where we are up to our eyeballs in Cardiac MR image segmentation. I'm writing you because Seg3D is the program we use to segment all of our images and I was told that you might be the person to speak with regarding a feature suggestion that would help us (and I'm sure many others) out tremendously.

We love Seg3D for the ease of use, volume segmentation, user interface, and simple data exporting. We use the 'Polyline' feature to segment ROI's because, even with good quality images, in-vivo cardiac MR image analysis requires a critical eye and experienced user control of border segmentation. The polyline feature allows for great user control, however, many points must be used to create nice, curved ROI's and often adjustments must be made so that the lines between points do not create sharp corners when you 'fill' the polyline, which is very time-consuming. Since our 3D modeling data is only as good as our image analysis, careful image segmentation has become a significant bottleneck and, at times, has been a prohibitive factor in the kind of studies we can conduct.  

I would like to recommend adding an option/function/button with the polyline that allows you to create a bicubic interpolation between the points of the polyline. For example, a user would place something like 15-20 points along a curved border (which would normally create a relatively linear-looking ROI) and then the user would click on a bicubic interpolation button. The polygon would then become a nice, smooth bicubic interpolation creating a better approximation of a given curved border and saving considerable time in the process. The user would then fill-in the curved line to create their new, more accurate mask layer. I would also recommend a 'revert' feature that will revert back to the original linear polyline to allow for adjustments, such as re-positioning points or adding points to better deal with very tight curves.

I have seen this type of interpolation work great with our cardiac 3D modeling program (Continuity 6 from the UCSD Cardiac Mechanics Group). The program uses bicubic meshes to interpolate and refine data in 3D space creating very nicely curved surfaces, so I believe that it would also work well with 2D images. This type of function would be such a big help for the Department of Cardiology and the Cardiac Mechanics Group in Bioengineering because they also use Seg3D primarily as well. Hopefully, I've explained the suggestion clearly, but if not, please don't hesitate to contact me with questions.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Marcus Bobar

858-534-4930

Seaweed Canyon Physiology Laboratory,

UCSD Division of Cardiology