Okay, so good morning everybody in the early hours, Tuesday morning. I have to apologize

yesterday, I didn't notice that I was having 50 minutes more than I should have, so let's

try to shorten the lecture for today, sorry for that. If I'm talking you know I'm not

thinking that much about time and so I like what I'm doing and bring me down, decelerate

if you just give me a moment. So what are we talking about this semester? We talk about

interventional medical image processing. That's more or less dealing with the problem, how

can we provide tools for the doctor while he's treating patient? Reliable tools while

he's treating patient to improve the currently existing procedures. And we started out yesterday

with magnetic navigation and the idea of magnetic navigation is easily explained by

looking at this little simple picture here. This is the NAIOBI system, you have here the

magnetic source, you have here your flat panel detector, you have here your magnets and with

these magnets you want to guide the catheter into the complex structures of the vessel

system. That's basically what we are talking about. And what I didn't mention yesterday

is that hardware technology with respect to the detector made this technology possible.

For those of you who attended the lecture on diagnostic medical imaging or image processing,

you know that we can have different technologies to visualize the energy of the photons or the

x-ray particles. We had discussed the winter semester, the image intensifiers and we have

discussed the flat panel detectors. And if you remember correctly, image intensifiers

they use an electron optics to accelerate the electrons in the vacuum tubes. Can you

imagine what is going to happen if you have the magnets to guide the catheter and the

detector that is sensitive to magnetic fields? Yeah, you can imagine what happens. You will

get no images out of this image intensifier because the electron optics will be influenced

by this technology. There was also one marketing point of view when companies started to think

about systems like that. At the beginning, you know, these detectors here, it was at

the beginning of 2000, so roughly 10 years ago, the image quality was not that convincing

and the technology was extremely expensive. So how could you make people buy this technology?

I mean you can say, oh look, you have here instead of, oh sorry.

I am sorry, I missed that. Confused professor. If you want to have the tone, you have to

pay more. Well, what I was telling you in the last five minutes, it was very important

for the oral exam. I was just a generic blah blah. Stories. What was I talking about? I

was talking about how do you make people buy things they don't need, right? That's marketing.

This detector technology was developed end of the 90s, beginning of 2000. And at the

beginning, the image quality you achieved with this type of technology was not that

convincing and the technology was extremely expensive. Detectors like that are 200,000

euros or more investment. And an image intensifier is on about 20, 30,000 euros. So you see the

difference. So you had to find something, an application, where you can tell people

if you don't buy the extremely expensive technology, the most recent technology, you can't do what

you are proposed to do with this type of systems. And so we came up with a magnet idea and the

magnetic navigation idea. And we were saying, but if you want to do that, you need the new

detector technology. So people started to buy these things. Today, it's state of the

art. You will not see a single system being shipped of the modern systems without a flat

panel detector. They more or less replaced the image intensifiers. I personally have

to admit that recently I had a health problem and I had to get an x-ray and I went to some

local doctor who has an x-ray system and I was shocked. You know, I was really shocked.

There is the chair. You should stand up at the chair. And then they had the analog system

with the film plate. And it was horrible. I was feeling, oh, God. Then I went back to

my doctor who was analyzing the image, the light box and all the old technology. And

I was saying, oh, what's this? I mean, there are much better systems out in the world.

And then my doctor became really angry and he was saying, if you are going to pay this

technology, you and your technology, I mean, we can live with that. We see what we need